Primer on Short-Lived Climate Pollutants- Download

Slowing the rate of global warming over the near term by cutting short-lived climate pollutants to complement
carbon dioxide reductions for the long term

The Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development’s mission is to promote just and sustainable societies and to protect the environment by advancing the understanding, development, and implementation
of effective, accountable and democratic systems of governance for sustainable development.
Beginning in 2005, the Institute embarked on a “fast-action” climate mitigation campaign to promote strategies that will result in significant reductions of emissions, temperature, and impacts in the near term, focusing
primarily on strategies to reduce non-CO2 climate pollutants, to complement cuts in CO2, which is responsible for more than half of all warming.
It is essential to reduce both non-CO2 pollutants and CO2. Neither alone is sufficient to limit the increase in global temperature to a safe level.
IGSD’s fast-action strategies include reducing emissions of short-lived climate pollutants—black carbon, methane, tropospheric ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons. They also include measures to capture, reuse, and / or store CO2after it is emitted, including biosequestration and strategies to turn biomass into more stable forms of carbon for long-term storage.
Durwood Zaelke, President*

* We would like to thank N. Borgford-Parnell, X. Sun, & D. Clare for their work on this Primer, as well as our outside reviewers. The online version has active links to the references, and is updated regularly. It is available on IGSD’s web site (http://www.igsd.org), as well as the UNEP web site for the Climate & Clean Air
Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants. Unless otherwise indicated, all content in this Primer carries a Creative Commons license, which permits non-commercial re-use of the content with proper attribution. Copyright © 2013 Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development.