Polluted Air Shortens Lifespans More Than Tobacco.

"SINGAPORE -- Cigarette smoking and other uses of tobacco shave an average of 2.2 years off lifespans globally. But merely breathing -- if the air is polluted -- is more damaging to human health.

That is the conclusion of a report published Tuesday by the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute, which identified air pollution as the world's top threat to public health, responsible for reducing average life expectancy by 2.3 years worldwide.

China, once the poster child for smog-filled skies, has been a surprise success story. Between 2013 and 2021, the world's second-largest economy improved overall air quality by more than 40%, while the average lifespan of residents increased by more than two years, the report said.

By contrast, four countries in South Asia -- India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan -- accounted for more than half of the total years of life lost globally because of pollution in the atmosphere during the same eight years. India alone was responsible for nearly 60% of the rise in air pollution worldwide during that time.

If India were to meet World Health Organization guidelines for particulate pollution, the life expectancy for residents of capital city New Delhi would increase by 12 years.

India's Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change didn't respond to a request for comment.

An increase in wildfires in places such as California and Canada has renewed attention on the dangers of polluted air. About 350 cities globally suffer the same level of dangerous haze that enveloped New York City in June at least once a year, according to calculations from environmental think tank Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which aggregates data from dozens of official government sources.

How seriously a country takes the problem typically depends in part on public awareness, said Michael Greenstone, an economics professor at the University of Chicago who contributed to the report. Knowledge of the health risks of poor air quality is low in many African and Asian countries, which suffer the worst outcomes.

"Air-pollution improvements are often driven by the demand of the people," he said. Having access to reliable monitoring tools to enforce clean-air requirements also is important, he added.

China's fight against air pollution began in the early 2010s, when an influential property tycoon, pointing to Beijing air-quality data published by the U.S. Embassy on Twitter, launched a social-media campaign that pressured the Chinese capital into being more transparent about pollution levels. Public demands continued and spread until the central government launched a "war on pollution" in 2013. Now, there are nearly 25,000 emissions-monitoring devices installed in plants and factories nationwide that provide publicly available hourly updates on emissions data.

The devices make it difficult for local officials to tamper with data and obscure environmental violations. Meanwhile, air quality became an important metric in evaluating the performance of local officials.

An experiment by U.S. and Chinese university researchers over eight months in 2020 across China showed that public complaints about air-quality violations, on social-media platforms for example, were more effective in reducing a firm's subsequent violations and emissions than private appeals.

China's Ministry of Ecology and Environment didn't respond to a request for comment.

Besides premature death, sustained exposure to air pollution can lead to a variety of illnesses, including heart disease, lung cancer and diabetes, other studies have shown." [1]

 

You can find out about the level of air pollution in different parts of Lithuania today here:

http://193.219.53.11/ap3/

Physical work outdoors can be avoided when air pollution is higher at a measuring station near you. It is possible to publicly discuss what our government is doing, which until now has been shamefully mainly concerned with the lives of other nations, thinking little about our, Lithuanians', problems.

 

1.   World News: Polluted Air Shortens Lifespans More Than Tobacco. Sha Hua. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 30 Aug 2023: A.6.