Thank you. I was able to locate an open access link that the authors shared. It seems like they are contrasting potential developmental trajectories, which are also associated with different patterns of PM2.5 emissions. The scenario associated with the highest level of emissions assumes rapid economic growth and improvements in healthcare (as does the two scenarios with the lowest levels of emissions). In those scenarios, they anticipate population aging and lower baseline mortality, and so cause of death patterns shift to those reflect age-related vulnerabilities.

Sorry, full article is behaving a paywall, and I can’t tell from just the abstract and blurry figures: are the authors saying that decreasing PM2.5 exposures increases the size of vulnerable populations because folks who would die in high exposure models live longer, and then die, under low exposure models? Or is there some other mechanism that links larger vulnerable populations to increased survivorship relative to high PM2.5 scenarios?