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Fossil Fuel Pollution Causes One in Five Deaths Globally: Study

Researchers estimated Tuesday that fossil fuel emissions caused more than eight million premature deaths in 2018, accounting for nearly 20 percent of adult mortality worldwide.

They stated in the journal Environmental Science that half of the grim tally was split between China and India, with another million deaths spread evenly between Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan and the United States, reports AFP.

The toxic cocktail of tiny particles cast off by burning oil, gas and especially coal was responsible for a quarter or more of the mortality in half a dozen nations, all in Asia.

“We often discuss the dangers of fossil fuel combustion in the context of CO2 and climate change and overlook the potential health impacts,” co-author Joel Schwartz, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a statement.

A strong additional motivation for policymakers to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and accelerate the global transition from brown to green energy should be the opportunity to prevent millions of premature deaths, he said.

Air pollution worldwide shortens lives by an average of more than two years, as previous research has shown.

Worst-hit is Asia, where average lifespan is cut 4.1 years in China, 3.9 years in India, and 3.8 years in Pakistan. In some regions of these countries, life expectancy is reduced by twice as much.

– ‘Pieces of the puzzle’ –

In Europe, it is shortened by eight months on average.

The new research almost doubles previous estimates of the number of people killed by pollution caused by fossil fuels.

The World Health Organization estimates that seven million people each year are killed by air pollution, including indoors, with 4.2 million of those deaths attributed to atmospheric or outdoor pollution.

Approximately the same amount is advanced by the most recent Global Burden of Disease studies, the most extensive catalog of why people die.

In order to assess concentrations of the smallest and most lethal emission caliber, known as PM2.5, all these calculations depended on satellite data and surface observations.

But they cannot determine whether these microparticles come from burning fossil fuels or, say, dust and wildfire smoke, according to co-author Loretta Mickley, an expert in chemistry-climate interactions at Harvard.

“With satellite data, you’re seeing only pieces of the puzzle,” she said.

To get a more fine-grained picture of where particle pollution comes from and its health impacts, Mickley and colleagues used a 3-D model of atmospheric chemistry, known as GEOS-Chem, that divides Earth’s surface into 50-by-60-kilometer (30-by-36-mile) blocks.

– A new risk assessment –

“Rather than rely on averages spread across large regions, we wanted to map where the pollution is and where people live,” said lead author Karn Vohra, a graduate student at the University of Birmingham.

The next move was to integrate knowledge on carbon emissions from the power sector, manufacturing, transportation, aviation and ground transport with air circulation simulations from NASA.

Once the researchers had PM2.5 concentrations on the global grid for each package, they still needed to assess the health implications.

Previous calculations of air pollution impacts — based on exposure to indoor second-hand smoke — seriously underestimate the danger, recent studies have found, so the researchers developed a new risk assessment model.

Compared with other causes of premature death, air pollution kills 19 times more people each year than malaria, nine times more than HIV/AIDS, and three times more than alcohol.

Coronary heart disease and stroke account for almost half of those deaths, with lung diseases and other non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure making up most of the rest.

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Topic : Climate Change

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