Fossil fuel pollution causes one in 5 deaths globally — Study
PARIS: Fossil fuel pollution caused more than eight million premature deaths in 2018, accounting for nearly 20 per cent of adult mortality worldwide, researchers reported Tuesday.
Half of that grim tally was split across China and India, with another million deaths equally distributed among Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan and the US, they reported in the journal Environmental Research.
The toxic cocktail of tiny particles cast off by burning oil, gas and especially coal was responsible for a quarter or more of the mortality in half a dozen nations, all in Asia.
“We o en discuss the dangers of fossil fuel combustion in the context of CO2 and climate change and overlook the potential health impacts,” co-author Joel Schwartz, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, said in a statement.
The potential to avoid millions of premature deaths should be a powerful additional incentive for policymakers to drive down greenhouse gas emissions and hasten the global shi from brown to green energy, he said.
Worldwide, air pollution shortens lives by more than two years on average, earlier research has shown.
The new study nearly doubles previous estimates of the number of people killed by fossil fuel pollution.
The World Health Organisation says that air pollution — including indoors — kills seven million people per year, with 4.2 million of those deaths due to ambient, or outdoor, pollution.
The most recent Global Burden of Disease study — the most comprehensive catalogue of why people die — advances roughly the same numbers.
Both of these estimates relied on satellite data and surface observations to determine concentrations of the smallest — and most deadly — calibre of pollution, known as PM2.5.
But they cannot determine whether these microparticles come from burning fossil fuels or, say, dust and wildfire smoke, according to co-author Lore a Mickley, an expert in chemistry-climate interactions at Harvard.
To get a more fine-grained picture of where particle pollution comes from and its health impacts, Mickley and colleagues used a 3-D model of atmospheric chemistry, known as GEOS-Chem, that divides Earth’s surface into 50-by60-kilometre blocks.
The next step was to plug in data on carbon emissions — from the power sector, industry, shipping, aviation and ground transport — along with Nasa simulations of air circulation.
Once the researchers had PM2.5 concentrations for each box in the global grid, they still needed to determine the consequences for health.
Previous calculations of air pollution impacts — based on exposure to indoor secondhand smoke — seriously underestimate the danger, recent studies have found, so the researchers developed a new risk assessment model.
Compared with other causes of premature death, air pollution kills 19 times more people each year than malaria, nine times more than HIV/AIDS, and three times more than alcohol.