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

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 degrees C and 0.35 +/- 0.10 degrees 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 shortterm emission reduction during the pandemic for China. The COVID-19 pandemic led to reductions in CO2 and aerosol emissions globally during 2020. This has substantial implications for climate at both the regional and global scales. Here, we use the simulations from CovidMIP to project climate change in China by the midcentury under different COVID-19 recovery emission pathways. We find that the short-term emission reduction during the pandemic has limited impacts on the long-term climate change, which is more dominated by the emission recovery after the pandemic. Under the greening recovery pathway similar to carbon neutrality, reduced CO2 mitigates warming while reduced aerosols increase precipitation in China compared to the baseline climate.