Why we shouldn’t forget that “elsewhere’s air” is our problem…
As the former environment editor for The Guardian, John Vidal toured the world witnessing our air pollution problem first hand. Here he tells the forgotten stories of the people and places who are breathing our planet’s dirtiest air.
Minibuses and lorries belched black and white smoke. Gases from roadside rubbish dumps and nearby factories mixed with traffic fumes from the clogged eight-lane highway, and the hot evening air was filled with a dense photochemical smog making nearby buildings barely visible.
It could have been New Delhi, Jakarta, La Paz or any one of 100 Asian or Latin American megacities, but this was the Mombasa road in Nairobi, Kenya, a city where the number of vehicles doubles every six years and where air pollution is always at hazardous or dangerous levels.
Even in a car, the eyes hurt and the breath came short. Just recently, I was travelling to the airport with a friend who had lived in the city for years but was thinking of returning to Britain because of the pollution: “It is mind-boggling and getting worse,” she said, “people use charcoal, paraffin and wood to heat their homes. You can see the haze of pollution building up from the early morning. I never used to wheeze. But what can you do — stop breathing?”
However, bad or illegal the urban air may be in London or Birmingham, it is unimaginably worse in fast-growing developing countries. According to the UN’s World Health Organization, air pollution is the new tobacco, a modern plague of toxic chemicals and minute particles of unburned soot prematurely killing over seven million people worldwide every year, and causing profound and long-lasting damage to tens of millions more.
Polluted air above WHO recommended levels plagues the UK but it mostly affects cities in places where coal and wood are widely used to heat homes, where cars, plastic and any other waste is mostly burned in the open.
For much of the world, it is a toxic time bomb. Because air pollution accumulates in the body and its impact is mostly considered to be irreversible, children and infants are the most affected. Asthma, strokes, cancers, lung and cardiac diseases linked to air pollution already stretch health services in cities like Tehran, Lahore, Bangkok and Lagos; but in years to come, they are likely to overwhelm them.
Until about 2014, China was the undisputed pollution capital of the world. When I first went to Beijing in the 1990s, you could see blue skies and the streets were free of traffic with most people riding bicycles. I returned 20 years later to find the streets were jammed with cars and people feared to venture into the billowing winter smog, which could linger for weeks at a time.
Pollution got so bad that the government was forced to close or relocate factories, ban old cars, and make people switch to gas heating rather than coal. China now has by far the world’s biggest fleet of electric cars and buses.
But despite over $150 billion having been spent on cleaning up the Chinese air, the cold winter weather often traps the dry, dirty air and there is little anyone can do. Over one million people a year are still said to die prematurely from China’s pollution.
But the world’s biggest country by population has now passed its pollution crown to India. A new report put out by the Centre for Science and Development in New Delhi paints a bleak picture, saying air pollution is now responsible for one in eight of India’s deaths, including 100,000 children aged under 5 every year. Nine of the world’s 10 most polluted cities are now Indian.
A major study has found that Delhi’s air pollution has ranked officially “severe” for 398 out of the last 703 days. In Dhaka, the massive capital of neighbouring Bangladesh, uncontrolled car emissions, constant road repairs and construction works makes breathing hard at all times.
I talked to Faruk Ahmed, an air pollution researcher there: “We analysed the dust in the air from traffic hotspots in Dhaka. We found it contained arsenic, zinc, nickel and levels of cadmium 200 times more than is considered acceptable in soil.”
Pollution affects life in unexpected ways in poor countries. Farms downwind of major cities record smaller harvests, education suffers because schools must close for days at a time, and tourists increasingly avoid pollution hotspots. Some of India’s iconic monuments have been damaged beyond recognition: The Taj Mahal is turning a brownish yellow, the marble Lotus Temple in Delhi has gone grey and the Golden Temple in Amritsar has lost its shine.
My fear is that Africa is going the same way as China and India. Half the world’s population growth over the next 30 years is predicted to occur there and the number of cars is rising dramatically as people flock to burgeoning cities.
There is little monitoring done for African air, but we do know the continent has become the dumping ground for the world’s most polluting vehicles. Most of the millions of cars and trucks exported to Africa every year from Japan, the US or Europe, are not just old but have also had their catalytic converters removed and will be run on contaminated fuel. The average age of cars driving around cities like Kampala in Uganda and Kinshasa in Congo DRC can be over 18 years old. Dirty air, say the analysts, could be killing 712,000 Africans, and costing over $175 billion a year.
I talked to Matt Evans, professor of atmospheric chemistry at York University, who leads research into urban air pollution in West Africa and who recently collected air samples by flying over cities in Nigeria, Ghana and Togo.
He was shocked by what he found. “It’s not just the cars. There is the burning of rubbish, cooking with inefficient solid fuel stoves, millions of small diesel electricity generators, cars which have had the catalytic converters removed and petrochemical plants all pushing pollutants into the air. Chemicals like sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide that have not been a problem in western cities for decades are a significant factor in African cities,” he said.
The most polluted city I have ever been to was probably Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. At the height of the war, I visited the main hospital expecting to hear the stories of wounded people. Instead, I found many of the patients were there because of respiratory, pulmonary or cardiac conditions that the doctors said were directly linked to the clouds of filthy air that people were breathing.
An official in the public health ministry listed the reasons. The city’s growth was uncontrolled; cars were running on contaminated fuel illegally imported from Iran; most of Kabul’s roads were unpaved, creating more dust; households relied on diesel generators and people burned anything to keep warm in the bitterly cold winters — including old tyres and plastic.
He estimated that one in four of all deaths in the war-ravaged country were actually caused by air pollution. “The war?”, he said. “It’s nothing. Air pollution kills far people than war. But no one wants to do anything about it.”
Words: John Vidal was environment editor of The Guardian for 27 years and has reported from over 100 countries.
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