As Pakistanis and Indians struggle with hazardous air quality, in Beijing – a city once notorious for its smog – the air quality is currently rated as good.

Ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government was so concerned about pollution that it introduced temporary restrictions on cars, shut down factories and work on some construction sites. It would take a few more years before the Chinese government implemented a clean air action plan in 2013. Since then, China has achieved a dramatic improvement in its air quality.

In this episode, we speak to Laura Wilcox, a professor at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading in the UK, to understand how China managed to clean up its air pollution. But Wilcox’s recent research uncovered some unintended consequences from this cleaner air for the global climate: the pollution was actually helping to cool the atmosphere and by taking it away, it may have accelerated global warming.

This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany, Katie Flood and Gemma Ware. Mixing by Michelle Macklem and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

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• Solar geoengineering: the risks and distractions of trying to reflect sunlight to cool the Earth – podcast
• Delhi: how weather patterns and faraway mountains made this the world’s most polluted megacity
• Cleaner air in east Asia may have driven recent acceleration in global warming, our new study indicates

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