London:
During these cold winter days, Anumita Choudhury dare not leave her small second-floor apartment in Delhi’s northern suburbs.
Elderly now, she has developed asthma.
The last time she ventured into the streets of the world’s second most populous city she began gasping for breath and had to be helped home by her neighbours.
The story is the same in many of the world’s great cities. From Kabul in Afghanistan to Hong Kong and Shijiazhuang in China, and from Lima to Sao Paulo in Latin America, people are increasingly suffering in severe toxic smogs — leaving hospitals and health clinics flooded with people with respiratory and heart problems.
Foul air has blanketed much of urban Asia for many weeks already this winter.
In Delhi, where there are nearly nine million vehicles, the high court has compared conditions to “living in a gas chamber”; Beijing and 10 other Chinese cities have issued red alert warnings; in Tehran, where the mayor, Mehdi Chamran, says air pollution kills up to 180 people a day, the smog has been so bad that schools have been closed and sports banned.
According to the World Health Organisation, the toxic fumes of growing numbers of diesel cars are combining with ammonia emissions from farming, wood and coal fires, tyre burning, open rubbish dumps, and dust from construction sites and brick kilns.
The consequence is a global crisis that threatens to overwhelm countries’ economies as people succumb to heart and respiratory diseases, blood vessel conditions, strokes, lung cancers and other long-term illnesses.
The toxic haze blanketing cities was observed last week from the international space station.
“It’s bad now, but we just don’t know what will happen in future,” says Maria Neira, WHO public health chief.
“This is the first generation in human experience exposed to such high levels of pollution. In the 19th century pollution was bad, but it was concentrated in just a few places. Now there are huge numbers of people living with high levels of pollution. Nearly 70% of people in cities are exposed to pollution above recommended levels.”
The problem is most acute in Asia, but many industrialised countries have been hit by smog this winter.
Milan, Naples, Barcelona and some other cities in Spain declared an emergency and banned traffic for several days over Christmas; Poland’s most popular mountain resort, Zakopane, was choked in fumes; and several London streets breached their annual limits for nitrogen dioxide just days into 2016.
According to a recent study in Nature, led by Johannes Lelieveld, director of the Max Planck Institute for chemistry in Germany, more people now die from air pollution than malaria and HIV combined. They include 1.4 million people a year in China and 650,000 in India.
This compares with about 180,000 a year in Europe. New WHO figures on 2,000 cities, to be released next month, will show pollution worsening in many countries. At the last count in 2014, 15 out of the 20 most polluted places were in India and China. The others were in Pakistan, Iran and Bangladesh. Of the worst 100, nearly 70 were in Asia and only a handful in Europe or the US.
But the WHO figures include only those cities that measure air pollution, and many of the worst offenders do not.
“As the world urbanises, the pollution grows,” says Frank Kelly, director of environmental health research at King’s College London.
“We suspect that many African cities have terrible pollution problems, but there is very little data. We know that places like Tehran are very polluted. In Europe the pollution is relatively clear in places like Germany, France and Britain, except for the diesel, but in eastern Europe, where they still have old industries, it is still very bad.”
After years of being discounted as an unavoidable cost of economic progress, air pollution is rising up the political and economic agendas, as developing countries grasp that the crisis threatens to cripple their economies and lead to simmering dissent.
According to a recent WHO study, the cost of disease and the 600,000 premature deaths caused in Europe every year by air pollution was more than $1.6 trillion (Dh5.88 trillion) in 2010, nearly 10 per cent of the gross domestic product of the EU in 2013.
The UK was estimated to have suffered $83 billion in costs associated with air pollution.
Elsewhere in Europe, the figures were Germany $145 billion, and France $53 billion.
The highest was in Bulgaria, which spent an estimated 29.5 per cent of its GDP on the costs of air pollution fatalities.
More than 90 per cent of citizens in the European region are exposed to annual levels of outdoor fine particulate matter above WHO’s air quality guidelines. This accounted for 482,000 premature deaths in 2012, from heart and respiratory diseases, blood vessel conditions and strokes, and lung cancer.
As concern over pollution grows, cities have begun to take action. On Friday, Delhi ended a two-week trial that took a third of the city’s three million private cars off the road by alternating entry to an odd and even number plates scheme and a ban on large diesel SUVs. City authorities said the trial resulted in a 50 per cent drop in air pollution “primarily caused by vehicular traffic”, but this is disputed.
China has recognised the problem and copied western countries by moving power stations out of cities. This, along with years of heavy investment in renewable energy and increased fines for polluting industries, has improved air quality in some areas.
However, away from big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai pollution is still bad.
“It was inevitable in places like London in the 19th century, when health was not considered so important,” says Neira. “But today it is irresponsible to allow it, and the argument of economic development is not valid. We need to develop a different culture in our cities. We need much better public policies.
“It needs social pressure and more awareness. There is no going back. People will not accept pollution. But not cities are aware how serious it is.
“If emissions continue to rise at current rates, the number of smog-induced deaths could double to more than six million a year by 2050, says Lelieveld.
“It is a grim scenario, but I doubt people will accept a doubling of pollution. It is a warning. Pollution is still getting worse, but the awareness is changing and there is a willingness to deal with the problem.”
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
