Time to see air pollution as a rights threat, says UN

LONDON: Air pollution has long been an environmental and health problem — but now it should now be viewed as a human rights issue as well, according to the UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment.

Air pollution is leading to 7 million premature deaths a year around the world, including 600,000 among children, David Boyd said.

“To put that 7 million figure in context, that’s more deaths every year than the combined total of war, murder, tuberculosis, HIV, AIDS and malaria,” the UN expert said in an interview.

“It’s a global health crisis that really needs to be addressed. Air pollution violates the rights to life, to health, the rights of the child, and also violates the right to live in a healthy and sustainable environment,” he said.

But clear solutions to the problem exist, he said in a report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, laying out a range of steps governments can take to cut air pollution.

Though air pollution has devastating consequences on a global scale, with marginalised communities among the most affected, Boyd, a professor of law, policy and sustainability at the University of British Columbia, said the problem has been overlooked in many places.

That’s in part because the most visible air pollution often has been cleaned up, leaving behind pollution that is harder to see and so easier to ignore.“we’ve addressed some types of air pollution in some places, and so a lot of the air pollution that we’re dealing with today you can’t really smell it, you can’t see it. It’s these really microscopic particles that people are inhaling into their lungs,” he said.

But in the past 15 years, doctors and scientists have made strides in discovering how harmful air pollution can be to health, with it leading to problems from heart diseases and lung cancer to neurological disorders including Alzheimers.

Because different countries have different sources of pollution — coalburning power plants in some, dirty transport or smoky cooking fires in others — solutions to address the threat need to vary from place to place but “we know what those solutions are,” Boyd said.

One crucial one is ending the use of coal-fired power plants, something rich countries should be able to do by 2030, he said. Nations from Canada to Britain have already agreed to make that change, he said. In his report, Boyd outlined steps member states are obligated to take “to fulfil their human rights obligations by reducing air pollution to acceptable levels”.

“The power of approaching it through a human rights lens — that can really serve as a catalyst to action,” Boyd said.

Rather than letting countries decide if they’d like to deal with the problem, it makes clear “they absolutely have legal obligations to deal with air pollution”, he said.

“Making it a human right can really empower the billions of people around the world who have been fighting for their right to breathe clean air.” If governments act on air pollution they can not only save lives immediately but also effectively act to curb climate change, he said.

A lot of the air pollution... you can’t really smell it, you can’t see it. It’s these really microscopic particles that people are inhaling into their lungs

DAVID BOYD UN special rapporteur