GAINS - Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies

Many of the traditional air pollutants and greenhouse gases have common sources, their emissions interact in the atmosphere, and separately or jointly they cause a variety of environmental effects at the local, regional and global scales.

Over the last years IIASA has extended its RAINS (Regional Air Pollution Information and Simulation) model to explore synergies and trade-offs between the control of local and regional air pollution and the mitigation of global greenhouse gas emissions. This new GAINS (Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies) model assists in the search for pollution control strategies that maximize benefits across all scales.

The European implementation of the GAINS model has been released in December 2006. It covers 43 countries in Europe (including the European part of Russia. The new GAINS model incorporates the latest version of the RAINS-Europe model as it has been prepared for the 2007 revision of the NEC directive. GAINS combines it with estimates of emissions, mitigation potentials and costs for the six greenhouse gases included in the Kyoto protocol, fully compatible with the methodology applied for the conventional air pollutants.

GAINS-Europe is implemented on the Internat and is accessible from this web site.

A two-years research contract has been received from DG-RESEARCH to implement the GAINS-Asia model for China and India. This project is carried out in cooperation with the Chinese Energy Research Institute (ERI) and India's The Energy and Resource Institute (TERI). Results are expected for late 2007.

Responsible for this page: Markus Amann
Last updated: 30 Jan 2012