With a view to protecting the people of from the health hazards of ever-rising air pollution, the state government is likely to launch a state-level clean air action plan with the technical support from the . A detailed road map for the implementation of ‘Bihar Clean Air Action Plan’ is in progress.
The Bihar State Pollution Control Board (BSPCB)’s chairman Ashok Kumar Ghosh pointed out that one round of discussion with the World Bank team on this plan has already been held and the team is likely to finalise this plan soon. The planning commission has also sanctioned funds for the provision of clean air to the people of the state.
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It may be mentioned here that the data of air quality released by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago had recently indicated that the average life expectancy of the people of Bihar is reduced by eight years due to ever-increasing air pollution. Furthermore, two cities of the state, namely, Patna and Muzaffarpur, figured among the 30 most polluted cities in the world as per 2021 World Air Quality Report released early this year by a Swiss organisation.
Continue Reading at Times of India…
The National Human Rights Commission has issued a notice to the Union environment ministry over the impact of air pollution on the life expectancy of people, officials said on Friday.
In a statement, the NHRC said it has taken motu cognizance of media reports quoting a survey that air pollution is a great threat to human health in India, reducing overall life expectancy by five years and 9.7 years for the people in Delhi.
The rights panel has observed that the contents of the media reports, if true, raise a serious issue of the right to life.
Accordingly, it has issued notice to the Secretary of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, seeking a report within four weeks, including the status of the National Clean Air Programme, launched in 2019.
The commission also expects the state authorities to take the issue with utmost sincerity in a time-bound manner, the statement said.
According to a media report on June 15, the residents in Delhi would gain 10 years of life expectancy on average if the annual average PM 2.5 levels did not exceed five microgrammes per cubic metre as per WHO standards.
The report has further categorized Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana and Tripura among the top polluted states, the NHRC said.
Continue Reading at Hindustan Times…
Delhi is the world’s most polluted city with air pollution shortening lives by almost 10 years, while in Lucknow it’s 9.5 years, according to the latest Air Quality Life Index by the Energy Policy Institute of University of Chicago (EPIC).
This is a pollution index that translates particulate air pollution into its impact on life expectancy.
The Indo-Gangetic Plain is the most polluted region in the world (see image below). Over half a billion people from Punjab to West Bengal are on track to lose 7.6 years of life expectancy on average, if current pollution levels persist according to the report.
This makes air pollution more lethal than smoking which reduces life expectancy by 1.5 years and child and maternal malnutrition’s 1.8 years.
While India is the second-most polluted country after Bangladesh, the immense Indo-Gangetic Plain is more polluted than it with PM 2.5 levels in 2020 measuring 76.2 micrograms/cubic metre vs 75.8 ug/m3. India’s average is far lower at 56.8 but take north India out of the equation, then the rest of India’s PM 2.5 level falls even lower to under 40 micrograms/cubic metre.
Delhi’s PM 2.5 levels measured 107.6, over ten times the WHO’s safe limit of just 5. PM 2.5 is an extremely tiny particulate matter made of toxic substances which settles deep in the lungs and other organs, beating the body’s defences.
The report’s authors call it the greatest global health threat with risks beginning right from the foetus stage.
Despite the lockdown, air pollution levels in India continued to rise in 2020, shortening the average Indian life expectancy by five years, compared to the global average of 2.2 years. This is a pan-South Asia crisis with levels rising in Pakistan and Bangladesh as well.
The reasons are clear. In the last two decades or so, vehicular traffic and coal-fired power plants are up three to four times across the region. This has been compounded by crop burning, brick kilns and other industrial activity.
Continue Reading at NDTV…
The study adds that the average Indian life expectancy is shortened by five years at current air quality levels.
India’s 1.3 billion people live in areas where the “annual average particulate pollution level” exceeds the WHO safe limit of 5µg/m³, it says.
Bad air kills millions in India every year.
The smog-filled air, which usually covers Indian cities during the winter months, contains dangerously high levels of fine particulate matter called PM2.5 – tiny particles that can clog lungs and cause a host of diseases.
The Air Quality Life Index by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) notes that some 510 million people who live in northern India – nearly 40% of India’s population – are “on track” to lose 7.6 years of their lives on average, given the current pollution levels.
However, reducing pollution levels to WHO standards would mean that an estimated 240 million people in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh would gain 10 years in life expectancy. EPIC says that since 2013, about 44% of the global pollution has come from India – currently the second most polluted country in the world.
The report says that more than 63% Indians live in areas that exceed the country’s own air quality standard – which says that 40µg/m³ is safe. But in 2019, India’s average particulate matter concentration was 70.3µg/m³ – the highest in the world.
“It would be a global emergency if Martians came to Earth and sprayed a substance that caused the average person on the planet to lose more than two years of life expectancy,” Michael Greenstone, one of the authors of the report said.
“This is similar to that situation that prevails in many parts of the world, except we are spraying the substance, not some invaders from outer space,” he added.
Continue Reading at BBC…
Pollution caused one in six deaths worldwide in 2019, a new study has revealed – more than the annual global tolls for war, malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, drugs or alcohol.
The study, published Tuesday by the Lancet Commission on pollution and health, found pollution kills 9 million people every year – nearly three quarters of them due to harmful air.
According to the study, deaths caused by air pollution and toxic chemical pollution increased by 66% over the past two decades, fueled by uncontrolled urbanization, population growth and a dependence on fossil fuels.
“The health impacts of pollution remain enormous, and low- and middle-income countries bear the brunt of this burden,” said Richard Fuller, the study’s lead author. “Despite its enormous health, social and economic impacts, pollution prevention is largely overlooked in the international development agenda.”
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India recorded the largest number of air pollution-related deaths in 2019, with more than 1.6 million people killed in the nation of 1.3 billion, according to the study.
Pollution levels in nearly all of India are far above World Health Organization guidelines, it added, forcing millions to breathe toxic air every day.
Last year, six of the world’s 10 most polluted cities were in India, according to monitoring network IQAir. Bad air could be reducing the life expectancy of hundreds of millions of Indians by as much as nine years, according to a recent study by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.
Continue Reading at CNN…
Nearly 1.6 million deaths were due to air pollution alone, and more than 500,000 were caused by water pollution.
The latest Lancet Commission on pollution and health report blamed pollution for nine million – or about one in six – deaths globally.
It said India – where bad air kills more than a million people every year – remained among the worst affected.
In an update of a 2015 estimate on premature deaths caused by pollution, the Lancet study said that data from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors Study 2019 (GBD) showed that pollution “remains responsible for approximately nine million deaths per year.”
Although there has been a decline in deaths attributable to types of pollution associated with extreme poverty such as household air pollution and water pollution, this fall has been offset by increased deaths caused by industrial pollution, ambient air pollution and toxic chemical pollution.
Globally, air pollution – both ambient and household – was responsible for 6.7 million deaths in 2019. Water pollution was responsible for 1.4 million deaths and lead pollution caused 900,000 premature deaths.
The study found that more than 90% of pollution related deaths occurred in low-income and middle-income countries, with India topping the list with 2.36 million and China at number two with 2.1 million deaths.
The report says that in 2000, losses due to traditional pollution were 3.2% of India’s GDP. Since then, death rates caused by traditional pollution have fallen and economic losses have reduced substantially, but these are still around 1% of India’s GDP.
Between 2000 and 2019, economic losses caused by modern forms of pollution – ambient, chemical and lead pollution – have increased and are now “conservatively estimated to amount to approximately 1% of GDP” in India.
The report says that India has made efforts to control air pollution especially with the ambitious Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, a scheme launched in 2016 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help poor rural women shift to cooking gas, but gaps remain.
“India has developed instruments and regulatory powers to mitigate pollution sources but there is no centralised system to drive pollution control efforts and achieve substantial improvements,” the study said adding that in 93% of the country, the amount of pollution remains well above the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines.
Indian cities have been routinely dominating global pollution rankings. More than 480 million people in northern India face the “most extreme levels of air pollution in the world”, a study by a US research group said last year.
In September last year, data from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago suggested that residents in the capital, Delhi, could see up to 10 years added to their lives if air pollution was reduced to meet the WHO guideline of 10 µg/m³.
In 2019, India’s average particulate matter concentration was 70.3 µg/m³ – the highest in the world.
Continue Reading at BBC…
In 2014, the World Health Organization reported that New Delhi was one of the most polluted cities in the world, with dangerous levels of fine particulate matter pollution, known as PM2.5. Ever since, New Delhi has been synonymous with hazardous air quality.
Over the last few years the air quality levels in one of the world’s fastest growing metropolises have ebbed and flowed, but for the most part New Delhi’s pollution levels remain higher than most cities across the world.
Now, the Swedish air quality monitoring company IQAir has released its annual World Air Quality report for the year 2021, again ranking New Delhi among the most polluted cities in the world and the most polluted capital city for a fourth consecutive year. IQAir also found that South Asia was the world’s most polluted region, where PM2.5 emissions from vehicle exhaust, commerce, the burning of stalks and other crop residue after harvest season and in-home cooking with solid fuels all combine to dangerously degrade air quality.
“You can barely see the leaves anymore, there’s a layer of dust that covers them all the time,” said Renu Singh, 39, a Ph.D student at Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi, describing the visible effects of air pollution in the city.
Singh, who has lived in Delhi for most of her life, has seen the city grow into a metropolitan area of more than 30 million people. Data suggests Delhi’s population will likely surpass Tokyo’s by the year 2030 and reach 39 million. And as the city continues to grow, so does its air pollution problem.
According to the 2019 Air Quality Life Index published by the University of Chicago, residents in Delhi would lose more than nine years of life expectancy if pollution levels from 2019 persist. The World Health Organization associates many short- and long-term health risk factors with exposure to PM2.5, tiny droplets of pollution smaller than 2.5 microns—about one-thirtieth the diameter of a human hair—that irritate the eyes, nose and lungs, aggravate asthma and other respiratory diseases and increase the risk of death from lung cancer and heart disease.
These particles come from vehicle exhaust, the burning of fuels such as wood, heating oil or coal, and natural sources such as grass and wildfires.
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The University of Chicago Air Quality Life Index estimates hazardous air quality levels have reduced life expectancy throughout the Indo-Gangetic plain by seven years. One of the most densely populated regions in the world, the plain is home to more than 500 million people and the hub for small, medium and large scale economic activity in South Asia.
Continue Reading at Inside Climate News...
Indian traffic policeman Surendar Singh waved away clouds of dust and smoke, and unbuttoned his shirt to show a small box bulging out of his chest.
“It literally keeps me alive,” said Singh, 48, as he showed the implanted cardiac defibrillator device that detects when his heart rhythm goes dangerously awry and delivers a shock to restore it to normal.
“It’s the price you pay for working in this madness,” he said, gesturing to a clogged intersection in the northern city of Bhiwadi, found to be the most polluted in the world.
Bhiwadi – an industrial hub – had the worst air quality of 6,475 cities surveyed for a report here published by Swiss air quality technology company IQAir last month.
The city’s air carries more than 20 times the World Health Organization’s recommended here maximum level of tiny airborne particles known as PM 2.5, which can penetrate deep into the lungs and cardiovascular system, it found.
Doctors say long-term exposure to polluted air can cause health problems from asthma and lung cancer to reduced blood oxygen levels that can cause irregular heartbeats that manifest in chest pain, tightness, or palpitations.
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‘SLOW POISON’
India is home to 63 of the 100 most polluted cities in the world, according to IQAir.
A two-hour drive to Bhiwadi from New Delhi – which was ranked the most polluted capital for the fourth time in a row – provides a snapshot of India’s air quality woes.
Hundreds of brick kilns billow thick smoke, road builders burn tar, farmers thresh grain and kick up clouds of chaff, residents set garbage piles on fire, and rumbling trucks leave a haze of dust in their wake.
Such a cocktail of pollutants is likely to reduce the life expectancy of about 40% of Indians by more than nine years, according to a report here published by U.S. research group the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC).
“It’s a slow poison that corrodes your body over years,” said Sunil Dahiya, analyst at the Delhi-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
Continue Reading at Thomson Reuters Foundation…
The atmosphere has changed in Beijing since the Chinese capital’s last Olympics in 2008. While the Summer Games 14 years ago were meant to be a forward-looking celebration of China taking its place on the world stage, the 2022 Winter Olympics have a markedly dourer tone, hamstrung by Covid-19 and political controversy.
But one aspect of Beijing’s atmosphere has clearly improved: the air itself. While the 2008 Games were marked by some of the worst air quality in Olympic history, China’s “war against pollution” has advanced so much since that Olympians this month could glimpse the previously smog-enshrouded mountains surrounding the city. Air pollution in the capital has decreased by 50 percent since the 2008 Olympics, which if maintained will lead to four years of additional life for the average Beijing resident.
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According to the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), global air pollution has decreased since 2011, but that drop is mostly concentrated in China. Most countries across South Asia, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa have experienced steady or increased air pollution in recent decades. The situation is especially bad throughout much of India: As of 2020, nine of the world’s 10 most polluted cities were in India, and people throughout the Indo-Gangetic plain could expect to live as much as nine years longer if pollution was reduced to the WHO guideline numbers.
To some degree, the increase in air pollution is a byproduct of economic development: more cars, more energy, more growth. But severe air pollution isn’t an immutable law of nature. From 2013 to 2019, China reduced its particulate pollution by 29 percent by using a suite of policies, including implementing new and better-enforced emissions standards for coal plants, limiting the building of new coal plants, restricting vehicles on roads in large cities, and increasing renewable energy. “If these reductions are sustained,” states an EPIC report from 2021, “China’s people can expect to live 1.5 years longer.”
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“Most of what we know about the impacts of air pollution on health are from short-term exposure studies, so these are studies that take advantage of daily or weekly or sometimes quarterly differences in air pollution concentrations,” says Michael Greenstone, director of EPIC, whose AQLI (Air Quality Life Index) tracks reduced life expectancy from air pollution. Yet, he adds, “the reason we regulate it is to change people’s long-run exposure to air pollution.”
The AQLI estimates are based on a 2013 paper that used a home heating program in China to approximate years of life lost by air pollution. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the Chinese government provided free coal for winter heating for households north of the Huai River, but not south of it. That policy created a natural experiment: Villages north and south of the river were mostly the same, save for increased indoor air pollution in the north because residents could afford to burn more coal there.
Life expectancies in those households north of the Huai River fell by an estimated 5.5 years. The researchers used this data to isolate the effect of air pollution from other potential causes of reduced life expectancy, and created the AQLI index to calculate the impact that different levels of particulate concentration can have on lifespan. Policymakers and the general public can use the AQLI to track how air quality has been affecting life expectancy in different countries and regions over the last 20 years. They’ve discovered that while air pollution shortens lives around the world, its main effects are concentrated in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.
While air pollution in Delhi has been bad for decades, the last 20 years have seen air pollution worsen in other areas of India and South and Southeast Asia, as economic growth has translated into increased vehicle and fossil fuel use. In the Central Indian states of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, according to EPIC’s 2021 annual report, “the average person … is now losing an additional 2.5 to 2.9 years of life expectancy” relative to the early 2000s due to air pollution. “Eighty-three percent of the country, by one estimate,” says Santosh Harish, South Asian Air Quality program officer at Open Philanthropy, “breathes air that is worse than the national standards,” which are themselves more lenient than the WHO recommendations.
In neighboring Bangladesh, the average person is losing 5.4 years of life expectancy due to air pollution, much more than 20 years ago. Urbanized regions of Indonesia, such as Jakarta, face similar burdens on life expectancy due to vehicle-related pollution and coal-fired power plants. Forest and peatland fires for agricultural clearance related to palm oil production in Kalimantan and Sumatra affect air quality across Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia.
Air pollution is a severe health threat in Nigeria, Ghana, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Nigeria, home to over 200 million people, air pollution has reduced life expectancy by 1.5 additional years compared to the early 2000s, caused by vehicles, industrial emissions, waste burning, port pollution, and the operation of diesel generators that are used because of the country’s unreliable electricity supply. As energy consumption in sub-Saharan Africa has grown, air quality has decreased throughout the region, according to the AQLI.
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A complementary approach might be market-based policies. “A great way to soften those trade-offs,” Greenstone told me, “is to use market-based regulations, which really minimize the regulatory costs and minimize the impacts on economic growth, and while doing that allow for robust improvements in environmental quality and ultimately people’s health.” The state of Gujarat in India, for example, started an emissions trading program for air pollution in 2019 in which the government sets an emissions cap and companies could buy and sell permits to discharge pollutants, creating an incentive for them to reduce pollutants. This has cut air pollution by roughly 15-20 percent, according to Greenstone; with this success, the government is expanding the plan throughout Gujarat, and a similar program is being implemented by the Indian state of Punjab.
End-of-pipe control measures — which mandate pollution reductions at the source — face some of the same challenges around incentives. These upgrades, which cut conventional pollutants like SO2, are effective at cleaning up the air — though they don’t reduce carbon pollution — without requiring an immediate transition away from coal. That’s important for countries like India where the energy supply is still dominated by coal, and will likely be so for years.
Such policies have been highly effective at cleaning up the air in China and Europe, as well as the US, but Peng notes that regulators pushing for cleaner air need to grapple with “the organized interests from the power generation companies that don’t want to do additional things to increase their costs.” That means governments have to spend time and money on the process of negotiation, along with monitoring and enforcement.
Cultivating public demand for clean air by warning people about its health risks can also drive action by governments and individuals across countries. Greenstone noted how large policy changes in other countries, like China’s “war on pollution,” were influenced by public demand. In a best-case scenario, this can create a virtuous cycle of policymakers, researchers, and other actors — such as what Kejriwal was trying to achieve with his daily tweets on Delhi’s air pollution levels this winter.
Continue Reading at Vox…
Gulpreet Singh begs for food from a dirty hemp mat spread on the sidewalk outside Delhi’s South Campus metro station.
Like millions of Indians who survive on handouts or daily wages, the 84-year-old says he has no choice but to be outside, breathing air thick with smog in the Indian capital.
“I come here and wait. Sometimes, people give me food,” said Singh, his voice straining over the noise of auto rickshaws and cars belching fumes just meters away.
Delhi is often ranked among the world’s most polluted cities, and air pollution there reached “hazardous” levels in early November, according to India’s National Air Quality Index (AQI), which tracks the presence of harmful particles in the air.
But some Delhi residents have become so accustomed to bad air that it’s a part of daily life — they barely notice it, they say.
Others say it’s making them sick.
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The ‘silent killer’
Delhi is not the only Indian city choked by smog.
Last year, nine of the world’s 10 most polluted cities were in India, according to monitoring network IQAir.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution causes an estimated 7 million premature deaths a year globally, mainly as a result of increased mortality from cardiovascular diseases, cancers and respiratory infections.
Bad air could be reducing the life expectancy of hundreds of millions of Indians by as much as nine years, according to a recent study by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC).
The study also found that every single one of India’s 1.3 billion residents endure annual average pollution levels that exceed guidelines set by WHO.
Continue Reading at CNN…
