Projection of Long-Term Climate Change in China Under COVID-19 Recovery Emission Scenarios

Abstract

The unexpected emergence of the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic resulted in anthropogenic emissions changes, which have significant consequences for the regional and global climate. However, the long-term impacts of emission reductions and recovery scenarios on regional climate change in China remain unknown. We use the COVID Model Intercomparison Project (CovidMIP) simulations to project climate change in China in the mid-21st century under four recovery emission pathways in the post-COVID era. We found that the temporary emission cut during the COVID-19 lockdown under the 2-year-blip scenario has limited long-term impact on regional climate change. Anthropogenic emissions are reduced under moderate and stringent greening recovery pathways, leading to reductions of 0.17 ± 0.09°C and 0.35 ± 0.10°C in surface air temperature (SAT) relative to the SSP2-4.5 baseline in China, respectively. Although the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions decreases SAT, the simultaneous enhanced surface solar radiation due to reduced aerosol concentrations partly offsets the GHG-induced cooling. Additionally, the weakened aerosol-cloud interactions associated with reduced aerosols increase the national precipitation by 1.30 ± 0.88 mm month−1 (1.63 ± 1.11%) and 1.91 ± 0.60 mm month−1 (2.39 ± 0.77%) in two green scenarios. As a comparison, regional precipitation decreases by 0.40 ± 0.53 mm month−1 (0.50 ± 0.66%) in the fossil-based recovery scenario. Therefore, long-term climate change is more dominated by the emission recovery pathways rather than short-term emission reduction during the pandemic for China.