This handbook covers the air quality/air pollution from the viewpoints of causing impacts on human/ecosystem health and climate change. Traditionally, air pollution has been a concern mainly in terms of its impacts on human health, and it is still an immediate public and governmental concern in most Asian countries. However, in recent years so-called extreme weather events, such as stronger tropical cyclones, flooding, drought, and other phenomena, have been manifested causing tremendous losses of human lives and properties. Importantly, climate models tell us that such extreme weather events are actually induced by anthropogenic global warming. It has been pointed out that mitigation or alleviation of such climate change leading to the extreme weather events in the next 30 years can be possible only by reducing air pollutants with positive radiative forcing such as ozone or methane, which are called short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs). Here, concerns about mitigation of air pollutants from the points of human health and climate change have merged.

This book covers different kinds of air pollutants and radiative forcers and how they can be measured. It also mentions the situation of air pollutants in different continents and their regional impacts to human health, environment and economy as well as their link to extreme weather events. The book presents how the air pollution and climate change can be mitigated and how clean air technologies and international initiatives for co-controlling air pollution and climate change have been developed.

Dr. Hajime Akimoto received his B.S. in 1962 and Ph.D. in 1967 in physical chemistry from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. For his postdoctoral research he spent 3 years, 1969-1971, in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Riverside, and worked on the chemistry of photochemical air pollution. In 1974 he joined the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan, as the head of the Atmospheric Chemistry Section in the Atmospheric Environment Division, and then served as the chief of the Atmospheric Environment Division and Global Environment Division.

Subsequently, Dr. Akimoto moved to the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at The University of Tokyo as a professor in 1993. In 2000, he joined the Frontier Research Center for Global Change, now under the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology as the director of the Atmospheric Composition Research Program. After 2010 he served as director general of the Asia Center for Air Pollution Research in Niigata, Japan. Currently, he is a guest scientist at the National Institute for Environmental Studies.