This is ghastly news about the deteriorating health of our planet's environment.
Pollution Killed 7 Million People Worldwide in 2012, Report Finds
By ANDREW JACOBS and IAN JOHNSON
BEIJING — From taxi tailpipes in Paris to dung-fired stoves in New Delhi, air pollution claimed seven million lives around the world in 2012, according to figures released Tuesday by the World Health Organization. More than one-third of those deaths, the organization said, occurred in fast-developing nations of Asia, where rates of cardiovascular and pulmonary disease have been soaring.
Around the world, one out of every eight deaths was tied to dirty air, the agency determined — twice as many as previously estimated. Its report identified air pollution as the world’s single biggest environmental health risk.
“The big news is that we have a better understanding of how large a role air pollution plays in strokes and coronary heart attacks,” said Dr. Carlos Dora, coordinator of public health and the environment at the organization. “Given the astronomical costs, countries need to find a way to prevent these noncommunicable diseases.”
Indoor air pollutants loomed as the largest threat, involved in 4.3 million deaths in 2012, while toxic air outdoors figured in 3.7 million deaths, the agency said. Many deaths were attributed to both.
The World Health Organization report, released in Geneva, coincided on Tuesday with the publication of a World Bank study in Beijing concerning China’s drive to urbanize. The study, issued with the Development Research Center of China’s State Council, argued that many of the country’s cities had been allowed to sprawl wastefully and called for better-planned, denser cities instead.
The study said the Chinese government could save $1.4 trillion of that cost — or about 15 percent of the country’s total economic output last year — by planning its cities more rationally.
One way would be to halt the current practice of expropriating farmers’ land and selling it to private developers, a method that helps raise money but leads to wasteful sprawl.
The bank said that building more densely in city centers would be more efficient; for example, Guangzhou, with 8.5 million residents, could accommodate 4.2 million more in the same space if it were as densely developed as Seoul, South Korea.
The reports by the World Bank and World Health Organization each said the burning of noxious fuels — coal, wood and animal waste — was among the greatest threats to human health.
Shanghai from a freeway
The dateline on this story reads Beijing. I was in Beijing and Shanghai last March, and in January of this year I flew low over the even larger city of Guangzhou on approach to landing in Macau. The levels of air pollution in these cities is hard for most Americans to imagine. The pollution over Guangzhou made it look like something from a computer animated post-apocalyptic movie. It was chilling to see. I suffer from asthma and the whole time I was in Thailand, Cambodia and China I was suffering from the poor air quality blanketing the entire region. So I have no difficulty understanding how the death toll from air pollution could be so high.
Last year a National Academy of Sciences study found that air pollution in China reduces life expectancy by 5 years.