Air pollution to kill many millions as planet warms
Pollution is trapped above cities by rising temperatures
● The warming of Earth will exacerbate deadly air pollution across the world and kill tens of millions of people over the next decade, not only in developing economies such as China and India but also in Europe and other wealthier countries.
A new study from Lancet Countdown that examines the impact of climate change on human health said the dangerously high levels of air pollution that contributed to 7-million deaths globally in 2016 will only get worse as the world becomes hotter.
Tackling worldwide air pollution is “probably the most important thing we should be considering from a public health perspective” to save lives, said Nicholas Watts, executive director at Lancet Countdown, a collaboration between 30 institutions including the World Health Organisation (WHO), World Bank and the Lancet medical journal.
“Climate change itself will make [air] pollution worse,” said William Collins, professor of atmospheric chemistry and Earth system modelling at the UK’s University of Reading, adding that climate-mitigation policies would have “almost immediate health effects”.
Climate change exacerbates air pollution by trapping the harmful particles in densely populated areas.
The pollution is also less likely to be “washed” out of the atmosphere in air that is drier, hotter and more still.
The problem has been particularly bad in India, which remains reliant on dirty power sources. Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s chief minister, said this month that the country’s capital had “turned into a gas chamber” because of smoke from crop burning.
The Lancet study singled out tiny particles known as particulate matter (PM2.5), which can penetrate the lungs and bloodstream and cause serious cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, as the single most dangerous air pollutant.
Particulate matter is generated by the burning of fossil fuels, industrial production, transport and household heating and cooking. The WHO has said there is no safe level of exposure to PM2.5.
Of 3,500 cities outside Europe with populations of more than 100,000, 83% have levels above the WHO’s recommended upper annual exposure limit, the report found. PM2.5 alone contributed to 2.9-million deaths worldwide in 2016, it concluded.
Yet while air pollution is “one of the greatest threats” facing humanity, it is also a problem that countries can “relatively quickly do something about”, according to Elizabeth Robinson, professor of environmental economics at the University of Reading and one of the report’s authors.
China, which has developed rapidly over the past 30 years, has experienced terrible smogs in recent years, but it has also taken significant steps to clean up its air.
The situation in many Chinese cities has improved as a result of “ambitious emission control efforts”, the report said.
In other developing economies, making effective policy changes quickly is more difficult, said Robinson. In Africa, for example, cooking on traditional stoves is the main cause of PM2.5.
In Europe and the US, levels of PM2.5 have been slowly declining as coal power plants are phased out.
However, if PM2.5 remains at 2016 levels for another 100 years, the lifespan of the average European is likely to be cut short by 5.7 months, the report found.
The impact would be most severe in Hungary, Romania and Poland, where lives would be shortened by more than eight months, since those countries burn more coal that other European nations.
India’s capital “turned into a gas chamber” because of smoke from crop burning