According to the results of this study urgent action must be taken to reduce emissions in order to avoid a global catastrophe by 2050. Researchers working in different projects funded by European research programmes have analyser for the first time all five major air pollutants that have harmful effects on human health and have concluded that air quality could reach dangerous levels in less than 35 years.

The results of this study carried out by the European Geosciences Union (EGU) show that if urgent measures are not applied in the coming years East Asian population will be exposed to extreme levels of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide. Northern India and the Arabian Gulf region, on the other hand, will suffer a marked increase in ozone levels.

Globally, the authors of the study highlight that the average world citizen will be exposed by 2050 to air pollution levels similar to those already suffered by the average citizen of East Asia. To avoid this deterioration climate negotiations under the Kyoto Protocol should be accelerated and the implementation of policies to improve air quality should be deepened. Along with these actions, the study highlights the need for a more effective legislation.

This study has been possible with the collaboration of some major projects funded by the research programs of the European Union. Among them, the CIRCE project, Climate change and impact research: the Mediterranean environment, and the EDEISA project, Extended distributed European infrastructure for supercomputing applications, which have been funded by under the Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Development and EDESIA's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) successor DEISA2, Distributed European infrastructure for supercomputing applications 2. Furthermore the C8 project, Consistent computation of the chemistry-cloud continuum and climate change in Cyprus, funded through a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant has also contributed to the study.