China pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 to combat global climate change, yet the resulting multi-aspect domestic impacts are not fully analysed due to an incomplete understanding of the underlying anthropogenic–natural interactions. Building an integrated cross-disciplinary modelling framework that can capture the feedbacks of changing aerosols on meteorology, here we highlight the amplified air quality, human health and renewable energy self-reinforcing synergies of China’s carbon neutral target in comparison to the baseline in 2015 and 2060. We find that owing to emissions reduction and more favourable meteorological conditions caused by less aerosol, achieving China’s carbon neutrality target in 2060 reduces national population-weighted PM_2.5 concentrations and associated premature deaths by ~39 μg m⁻³ and 1.13 (95% confidence interval: 0.97–1.29) million while boosting provincial solar (wind) power performance by up to ~10% (~6%) with mostly decreased resource variability in comparison to the 2060 baseline. Enhanced renewable performance along with low-carbon energy transition may provide additional opportunities to address the remaining air pollution and associated human health damages upon achieving carbon neutrality. Our results highlight that global developing and polluting countries’ pledge for carbon neutrality can produce important positive feedbacks between aerosols mitigation, air quality improvement and enhanced renewable energy, which can be amplified via weakened aerosol–meteorology interactions and better atmospheric dispersion.

Temporary emission control measures in Beijing and surrounding regions have become a prevailing practice to ensure good air quality for major events (e.g. the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit on 5-11 November 2014) and to mitigate the severity of coming pollution episodes. Since PM 2.5 affects meteorology via aerosol-meteorology interactions, a question arises how these interactions may impact the response of PM 2.5 to emission reductions and thus the effectiveness of emission control measures. Here we use the coupled meteorology-chemistry model WRF-Chem to investigate this issue with focus on aerosol-radiation interactions (ARI) for the APEC week and three more polluted episodes over North China. We find a quadratic relationship between PM 2.5 concentration changes due to emission reductions and PM 2.5 levels, instead of an approximately linear response in the absence of ARI. The ARI effects could only change the effectiveness of emission control by 6.7% during APEC in Beijing, but reach 21.9% under more polluted conditions. Our results reveal that ARI can strongly affect the attribution of PM 2.5 variability to emission changes and meteorology, and is thus important for assessing the effectiveness of emission control measures.