Late in 2025, a team of Chinese researchers published a paper linking Australia's hot and dry weather in the 2010s to China's aerosol reductions.
They found weather systems were impacted thousands of kilometres across the Pacific, reducing moisture across large parts of Australia and significantly raising the risk of bushfires in all states and territories.
Despite Australia's relatively high rainfall since 2020, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology professor Yang Yang, who was among the study's authors, said changes in China had continued to impact Australian weather [....]
Last year, a team of mostly European climate scientists labelled East Asian aerosol reductions as the biggest reason for the acceleration of global warming since 2010.
Scientists frequently liken the impact of removing pollution to "unmasking" or "revealing" warming that had already been caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
Decades before China's emissions peaked, Europe's effort to cut pollution demonstrated this effect.
Climate scientist Karsten Haustein estimated that most central European countries had experienced almost 3 degrees Celsius of warming since pre-industrial times, exacerbated when the cooling effect of that pollution was removed.
"Probably a bit more than a degree of extra warming was essentially just hidden by the aerosols," he said [....]
In 2024, Tim Cowan was among a group of researchers who found Asian aerosol emissions had increased Australia's monsoon rainfall in the decades before China's historic clean-up.
"Observations show a significant increase in Australian summer monsoon rainfall since the mid-twentieth century," the researchers wrote in a paper published in The Journal of Climate.
This aligns with Professor Yang's assertion that China's reduction of its aerosol emissions had the opposite effect on Australian rainfall from 2013 [....]
While scientists unpack the consequences of China's dramatic smog reversal, more of Australia's Asian neighbours are seeking to emulate its success.
In India and Bangladesh, air pollution is a persistent and deadly problem linked to millions of excess deaths each year and, increasingly, acidic rainfall.
Climate experts agree it is imperative to reduce the pollution, but acknowledge it will likely increase heating and extreme weather in the South Asian region.
"From the temperature point of view, there will definitely be a local increase," Dr Haustein said.
"If we remove the [aerosols it] means more flooding in Bangladesh, and in India, maybe issues with the pre-monsoon, which is really important for agriculture."
However, when asked how this might affect the Pacific and Australia, Dr Haustein was hesitant to make such clear predictions.
"Disentangling the remote effects [of aerosols], not only the regional effects … it's crazy difficult," he said.
