Worsening air pollution and lead poisoning have kept global deaths from environmental contamination at about 9 million a year since 2015, despite modest progress in tackling pollution on other fronts, a team of scientists said on Tuesday. (17).
Air pollution from industrial processes, along with urbanization, led to a 7% increase in pollution-related deaths from 2015 to 2019, according to scientists’ analysis of data on global mortality and pollution levels.
“We’re sitting in the cauldron and slowly burning,” said Richard Fuller, co-author of the study and head of the nonprofit Pure Earth. But unlike climate change, malaria or HIV, “we haven’t focused too much on environmental pollution.”
An earlier version of the work published in 2017 also estimated the death toll from pollution at about 9 million a year — or about one in six deaths worldwide — and a cost to the global economy of up to $4, 6 trillion a year. This puts pollution on a par with tobacco in terms of global deaths. Covid-19, by comparison, has killed an estimated 6.2 million people worldwide since the pandemic began.
For their most recent study, published in the online journal Lancet Planetary Health, the authors analyzed 2019 data from the Global Burden of Disease, an ongoing University of Washington study that assesses overall pollution exposure and calculates mortality risk.
The new analysis looks more specifically at the causes of pollution, separating traditional contaminants such as indoor smoke or sewage from more modern pollutants such as industrial air pollution and toxic chemicals.
According to the study, deaths from traditional pollutants are decreasing globally. But they remain a big problem in Africa and some other developing countries. Contaminated water and soil and dirty air put Chad, the Central African Republic and Niger as the three countries with the most pollution-related deaths, according to population-adjusted data.
Deaths from exposure to modern pollutants such as heavy metals, agrochemicals and fossil fuel emissions are “just skyrocketing”, up 66% since 2000, said co-author Rachael Kupka, executive director of the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution. , based in New York.
When it comes to outdoor air pollution, some major capitals have had some success, including Bangkok, China and Mexico City, the authors said. But in smaller cities, pollution levels continue to rise.
The study provided a list of the ten countries most affected by pollution-related deaths, based on their findings on population-adjusted mortality:
- Chad
- Central African Republic
- Niger
- Solomon Islands
- Somalia
- South Africa
- North Korea
- Lesotho
- Bulgaria
- Burkina Faso
