2016 WHO Report on Ambient Air Pollution

In September 2016, WHO released a report entitled ‘Ambient air pollution: A global assessment of exposure and burden of disease’. The Report said that air pollution continued to rise at an alarming rate, and affected economies and people’s quality of life and that it was a public health emergency.

The important findings of the Report were:

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• Air pollution – both ambient (outdoor) and household (indoor) – is the biggest environmental risk to health, carrying responsibility for about an estimated 6.5 million deaths (or one in every nine deaths annually).
• Ambient (outdoor) air pollution alone kills around 3 million people each year, mainly from non-communicable diseases.
• Only one person in ten lives in a city that complies with the WHO Air quality guidelines.
• 92% of the world’s population lives in places where air pollution levels exceed WHO limits.
• 98% of cities in low- and middle income countries with more than 100,000 inhabitants do not meet WHO air quality guidelines.
• In 2012, more than 600,000 people died in India due to air pollution. We were second only to China, where 800,000 people died. The deaths were caused mainly by lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and cardiovascular diseases.
• In the same year, the DALYs were 20,506,000 in India and 23,625,000 in China.
• Of all of pollutants, fine particulate matter has the greatest impact on health. A lot of the fine particulate matter comes from fuel combustion, both from mobile sources such as vehicles and from stationary sources such as power plants, industry, households or biomass burning.

In 2016, WHO is rolling out BreatheLife, a global communications campaign to increase public awareness of air pollution as a major health and climate risk. BreatheLife is led by WHO in partnership with the UNEP-hosted Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-lived Climate Pollutants.

The campaign stresses both the practical policy measures that cities can implement (such as better housing, transport, waste, and energy systems) and measures people can take as communities or individuals (for example, to stop waste burning, promote green spaces and walking/cycling) to improve our air.

(This post relates to Chapters 11 and 12 of the book.)