UT Global Study Shows Climate Action Could Prevent 13 Million Deaths Worldwide
- Jun 25, 2026
A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, Emory University and Princeton University, along with collaborators across six countries, recently discovered that policies helping to save the climate could also prevent millions of premature deaths across the planet.
Their April 2026 study, published in Lancet Global Health, found that solutions designed to protect developing countries from bearing an unfair share of costs for cutting carbon emissions could unintentionally deprive those same countries of life-saving air quality improvements.
In the interest of accurately assessing policy impacts on emissions, air quality, health and economic welfare across 178 countries through the end of the century, researchers tested models for multiple approaches toward achieving the 2015 Paris Agreement's target of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius.
During this process, experts found that climate action consistent with the two-degree-Celsius target would prevent more than 13.5 million premature air pollution deaths worldwide between 2020 and 2050 — overwhelmingly in low- to middle-income countries (LMICs). However, the total amount and distribution of those health gains would depend critically on how the global prevention burden is shared.
“We show that there is a difficult tension between international distributive climate justice and the goal of saving lives via air pollution co-benefits,” said Mark Budolfson, associate professor of philosophy, geography and the environment at UT Austin, and co-lead author of the study. “Within the current Paris Agreement climate regime involving Nationally Determined Contributions to global emissions reductions, shifting mitigation from poor countries to rich countries has the perverse effect of reducing the number of lives saved via air quality improvements in poor countries — possibly by millions.”
The researchers identified a scenario that resolves this tradeoff: an equity-based climate design in which lower-income countries invest their climate policy funds into standard air pollution remedies, while wealthier nations focus on devising and implementing advanced climate solutions. This “Equity + Air Quality" scenario emerged as the most favorable overall, finding that for LMICs, the savings from reduced climate mitigation costs would cover the expense of the air quality measures.
These findings will directly influence future rounds of climate negotiations, in which countries will update their emission-reduction pledges.
