Future Air Pollution
By Dr Arvind Kumar
According to a recently published study in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, an Open Access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU), it has been reported that air pollution is a major health risk that may worsen with increasing industrial activity. At present, urban outdoor air pollution causes 1.3 million estimated deaths per year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. It is further revealed that most of the world’s population will be subject to degraded air quality by 2050 if human-made emissions continue as usual. In this business-as-usual scenario, the average world citizen four decades from now will experience similar air pollution to that of today’s average East Asian citizen.
The researchers applied a multi pollutant index (MPI), suited for global model output to identify possible future hot spots of poor air quality. It appears that East and South Asia and the Middle East represent such hotspots due to very high pollutant concentrations, while a general increase of MPIs is observed in all populated regions in the Northern Hemisphere. In East Asia a range of pollutant gases and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is projected to reach very high levels from 2005 onward, while in South Asia air pollution, including ozone will grow rapidly towards the middle of the century. Around the Persian Gulf, where natural PM2.5 concentrations are already high (desert dust), ozone levels are expected to increase strongly. Air pollution would increase in Europe and North America, but to a much lesser extent than in Asia, due to the effect of local mitigation policies that have been in place for over two decades. Taking all pollutants into account, eastern China, northern India, the Middle East, and North Africa are projected to have the world’s poorest air quality in the future.
