The Asian Co-benefits Partnership (ACP), Ministry of the Environment of Japan, and Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) have published a new white paper on the co-benefits of climate change initiatives and policies called Bringing Development and Climate Together in Asia.
They authors note that "more than two decades ago, researchers analysing the costs of mitigating greenhouse gases (GHGs) determined that some climate change strategies deliver additional local air quality and public health benefits. Researchers would later coin the term “co-benefits” to refer to these additional benefits. In the years that followed, researchers would estimate the value of a variety of co-benefits (including but not limited to improved air quality and public health). These studies demonstrated that accounting for co-benefits could offset GHG mitigation costs, thereby allaying one of the chief concerns confronting policymakers when considering climate actions. More recently still, the air pollution community has begun to use co-benefits to capture the multiple gains from mitigating species of air pollution that warm the climate over relatively short atmospheric lifetimes, known as short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs)."
Download the report at: http://www.cobenefit.org/publications/images/ACPwhitepaper_FY2013.pdf