Air Pollution Health Climate Crisis Fossil Fuels

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Air pollution affects nearly every person on this planet. Yet global efforts to combat the scourge – which is associated with about 8 million premature deaths worldwide every year, can damage nearly every part of our body and is linked to everything from miscarriages to dementia – lag decades behind our knowledge of its impacts.

Tens of millions of people in Indonesia are now suffering in swathes of thick smoke caused by “slash and burn” agriculture and exacerbated by the hot conditions. In India, ground-level ozone from vehicle fumes and industry has emerged as the key summer threat, while outside its megacities there have been protests in areas affected by toxic coal dust. Across the northern hemisphere this summer, wildfires driven by the climate crisis have spread poor air across continents – already, 1.5 million people globally die every year from the impacts of wildfire smoke.

It would be easy, in the face of such an intractable problem, to give up. But some cities have shown the way to a brighter and cleaner future. More on this, after this week’s most important reads.

Essential reads

In focus

Today, Paris is renowned as a cycling city, with PM2.5 pollution and nitrogen dioxide levels more than halved since 2005. Barcelona now has nearly 168 miles (270km) of bike lanes and a network of “superblocks” where vehicle traffic is restricted. China has met pollution reduction targets in Beijing, Shenzhen and Chengdu (though many other cities still lag behind). In developing countries, too, there are positive moves: Mexico is reducing pollution from industry; the Colombian capital, Bogotá, has seen strides in suppressing dust, the major cause of its poor air; and in Kenya, Nairobi has set ambitious air quality targets with a new monitoring system as a first step.

The latest good news comes from London, where children have been found to have bigger and stronger lungs after the introduction of an ultra-low emissions zone (Ulez). The study, conducted by Queen Mary University of London and published in the Lancet Public Health journal, examined the lungs of nearly 1,700 children in London alongside a similar number in Luton, a town with a similar mix of traffic pollutants but no clean-air zone, from the period before the Ulez introduction until 2022. Where they once had significantly smaller lungs than children in Luton, the London children’s lungs improved to having roughly equal lung capacity over the course of the study.

Ulez, introduced by London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, in 2019 and expanded in 2021 and 2023, charges a fee of £12.50 a day for higher-polluting vehicles that do not meet stringent standards. It has helped drastically cut levels of nitrogen dioxide, a harmful pollutant.

Though the Queen Mary University of London’s paper, as an observational study, could not directly prove causation, the results showed a clear correlation between lung capacity and the introduction of the Ulez restrictions. “We can say the implementation of Ulez led to clearer air and was associated with faster lung growth,” says Chris Griffiths, professor of primary care at the University of Oxford, and one of the study’s authors. “That gives us some confidence of a causal relationship.”

This week, the UK launched a new alert service to inform vulnerable people when air pollution is high. Sir Chris Whitty, chief medical officer for England, said: “Air pollution is an extremely important, solvable health problem that causes ill health throughout the life course. The health impacts are greatest for the most vulnerable – children, pregnant women and people with pre-existing cardiovascular or lung conditions.”

Successes such as Ulez may make the solutions – clean-air zones, more cycling, incentives to scrap the most polluting cars, better public transport, clampdowns on industrial polluters, a switch away from fossil fuels to renewable energy – look easy, but solving air pollution still requires massive coordinated efforts from local and national governments, as well as changes of behaviour by citizens and businesses. Change didn’t happen overnight in any of the cities that achieved positive results, and the measures were often met with severe opposition.

Attempts to introduce clean air measures are routinely met with vocal opposition from some politicians, usually on the right, and some businesses. But politicians who persevere with the measures are often rewarded by voters. Anne Hidalgo, Paris’s former mayor, who led the city’s “cycling golden age”, was re-elected in 2020 by a clear margin, and later won a referendum on tripling parking costs in the city for SUVs; in Barcelona, objections from businesses to plans for traffic “superblocks” were outweighed by approval from citizens, who then returned its mayor, Ada Colau, in 2019.

We often associate dirty air with traffic, coal-burning or heavy industry, but it’s not just an issue on the streets: indoor air pollution also kills. In developing countries where solid fuels and biomass are commonly used, this is a particular problem: about 3 million people a year globally die prematurely from indoor air pollution.

That is why the International Energy Agency has embarked on a clean cooking campaign, with more than $3bn pledged to the initiative so far.

In developed countries, where biomass and solid fuel cooking are now rare, the hidden dangers of gas stoves are increasingly hard to ignore: new studies show that 40,000 Europeans die prematurely from the pollutants they spew out. A switch to electricity would benefit health.

Governments have more to do to assist the move away from old fossil fuel technology to cleaner modern alternatives. Cop31, the latest edition of the annual UN climate talks, will focus on electrification and the huge gains to be made from moving transport, heating, industry and cooking from fossil fuels to clean electricity – a boon not just for the climate, but for our lungs, bodies and brains.

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