Air pollution cutting 660 million lives short by 3 years: Report

The Economic Times , Monday, February 23, 2015
Correspondent : Urmi Goswami
NEW DELHI: Mounting evidence that India's poor air quality is cutting short lives is increasing pressure on the government to speed up corrective measures.

The latest pointer to the magnitude of the problem is a study by environmental economists from University of Chicago, Harvard, and Yale. Their report, published on Saturday, says that 99.5% of the Indian population breathes air that has pollutants way above the levels considered to be safe by the World Health Organisation.

In many parts of the country, including 77% of urban areas, the pollution levels exceed national standards.

This is cutting short the lives of 660 million Indians by a little more than three years, the report adds.

The study uses data to show that non-compliance to national and international standards is both an urban and a rural phenomenon, more marked in north India, blowing the myth that the problem is restricted to urban areas.

The study focuses on particulate matter (referred to in air pollution parlance as PM and these are of varying sizes), which affect cardiovascular and respiratory systems and have been consistently found to be dangerous to human health.

The 660 million people, or 54.5% of the population, the study refers to live in areas where the level of pollution exceeds the limits set out in National Ambient Air Quality Standard. India's national air pollution sets the permissible PM 2.5 levels at 40 micrograms per cubic metre, which is four times WHO's safe level.

"Air pollution is an urgent public health problem that deserves policy attention. In approaching the issue of air pollution as one of public health, it would be possible to break the perception and understanding that addressing environmental issues like air pollution and economic growth/development are somehow opposed to each other," Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago, who led this study, told ET.

The Global Burden of Disease Report 2010 estimated that outdoor air pollution accounted for about 6% of deaths worldwide.

In 2012, the WHO attributed 7 million deaths globally to air pollution. India has the highest rate of death caused by chronic respiratory diseases.

A 2013 analysis of government data and the Global Burden of Disease report on India by the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment revealed that air pollution was the seventh leading cause of loss of about 18 million healthy years of life.

The levels of pollution and with it the impact on health and mortality have increased dramatically. "Reducing pollution in these areas (where pollution exceeds the national norms) to achieve the standard would, we estimate, increase life expectancy for these (660 million) Indians by 3.2 years on average for a total of 2.1 billion life years," Greenstone and other researchers state in their study, "Lower Pollution, Longer Lives: Life Expectancy Gains if India Reduced Particulate Matter to Air-Quality Standards".

"The loss of more than two billion life years is a substantial price to pay for air pollution. And yet this may still be an underestimate of the costs of air pollution, because we do not account for the impact of other air pollutants, the impacts of particulates on morbidity or labour productivity, as well as preventive health or avoidance costs borne by Indian households," the study states.

Poor air quality in India has been on the international radar since May last year when the WHO found that 13 of the 20 cities with very high levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) were in India. The study, which analyses data from the Central Pollution Control Board, reports that in 77% of the country's urban centres, the levels of respirable suspended particulate matter (PM10) exceed the national norms.

The air pollution discourse in the country has been centred on urban areas. This study broadens the data used. For urban areas it relies on monitoring data from the Central Pollution Control Board, while for areas not covered by CPCB's monitoring network, it uses satellite measurements of air pollution.

The paucity of accurate and widespread data is a challenge for India. "There is room for improvement, wider network of monitors, more vigorous calibration will yield more accurate data," Greenstone said. While the magnitude of the problem may not have been evident, the Indian government recognises the serious challenge that air pollution presents.

 
SOURCE : http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/air-pollution-cutting-660-million-lives-short-by-3-years-report/articleshow/46337426.cms?prtpage=1
 


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