Health amid air pollution and climate change
Colombia is home to Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who authored such literary masterpieces as “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”
It was also the venue of the recently concluded Second Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health, organized by the World Health Organization (WHO). Viewed as disparate issues, air pollution and health are recognized as being intertwined.
History shows that the London Smog in 1952, when air pollutants from coal and a weather phenomenon formed a thick layer of smog over the city, caused some 12,000 deaths mainly due to respiratory tract infections.
With rapid industrialization, the earth became a huge gas chamber, choking us with harmful pollutants. Epidemiological studies and toxicologic investigations have since nailed down the strong association between air quality and health, leading to clean air mandates the world over. But air pollution remains a major preventable cause of death worldwide, especially in vulnerable low- and middle-income countries.
In 2023, according to the WHO, 99.9 percent of the world’s population were exposed to unhealthy air and every year, seven million deaths are linked to exposure to outdoor and household air pollution. Two-thirds of outdoor air pollution emissions are generated by fossil fuel combustion, the same culprit behind climate change.
As a leading risk factor for both mortality and morbidity, air pollution can cause chronic respiratory diseases, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, and mental health conditions. More worrisome is that air pollution unevenly affects low and middle-income countries, where 90 percent of related deaths occur. It also puts vulnerable groups—babies and children, pregnant women, the elderly, chronic disease patients, people with lower socioeconomic status—at higher risk.
Philippine data in 2019 showed that an estimated 66,230 deaths were attributed to air pollution, with economic costs reaching P 2.32 trillion, or almost 12 percent of our country’s gross domestic product.
Aside from numbers, stories about children missing school, young parents dying of lung cancer, the elderly needing oxygen support to live, and poor people falling into catastrophic debts to pay hospital bills should bring enough attention to air pollution.
More than just a local environmental issue, air pollution is a global public health concern that is hyped even more in the era of climate change. Climate change is caused by human-induced greenhouse gas emissions which are common air pollutants. Climate change-related increase in temperature worsens air pollution and exacerbates its health impacts. Extreme heat and wildfires can also lead to severe air pollution events.
But human emissions leading to air pollution may be controlled, as shown by pandemic restrictions, like lockdowns, which resulted in clean air and blue skies, albeit temporarily.
Air pollution is also an economic, social, and legal issue that comes with a huge moral imperative for action. The right to clean air is a fundamental human right that must be upheld by everyone. Guaranteeing social justice in terms of promoting the health of those most vulnerable to air pollution and climate change must be a slogan for collective action.
The call for action from the conference is very clear—reduce global air pollution by 50 percent by year 2040. This will significantly improve life expectancy and reduce premature deaths. If the target is met, the economic benefit of integrated pollution management can reach around $2.4 trillion.
For this to happen, the health sector should do this four-pronged approach:
1. Strengthen its health system to address air pollution by conducting health impact and vulnerability assessment as guide in strengthening its health-care delivery infrastructure, enabling it to manage air pollution-related diseases;
2. Enhance its data collection and monitoring of health impacts to form part of an early warning system that will serve as basis for communicating the health risks of air pollution. Also, improve cross-sectoral (with environment, transport, energy) and transboundary collaboration to mitigate and respond to health impacts of air pollution;
3. Ensure community-oriented and people-centered approaches in promoting better awareness of air pollution as a health issue and in driving health policies that highlight local and innovative solutions for clean air and universal health care, and
4. Secure a healthier future through clean air, something that’s pure logic founded on science.
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Ronald Law is a physician, public health specialist, and academic focused on the intersections between climate change, environmental hazards, and health issues.
