Chris Woodford - Breathless: Why Air Pollution Matters - And How It Affects You

Y ouve probably seen those side-by-side photos on cigarette packets. On the left, the healthy pink lung of a non-smoker; on the right, the clapped-out, blackened lump from a hopeless tobacco addict. What you might not realise is that air pollution the kind you might be breathing right now can have horribly similar effects. In Delhi, one of the worlds dirtiest places, chest surgeons estimate that the tiny, toxic specks in the smog (technically, theyre known as PM2.5 particulates) are as bad for you as smoking 50 a day (just like smoking, they can lead to pneumonia, asthma and lung cancer). Even a few days in Paris, Milan, London or Rome is like puffing your way through two or three cigarettes (either way, youll be exposed to a similar amount of PM2.5s).

According to one recent study, there are fifteen cities in the world where the air is so toxic that active exercise will do you more harm than good. But you dont have to live in a filthy metropolis to feel the harsh effects of polluted air. Even if you live in a tiny town, you still might wince in damp December when that strange, metallic tang hits your tongue, as the fug seeping from stalled exhausts bubbles up from the cauldron of the streets into a low-level cloud of malignant mist. Maybe youve worried about cycling in the sooty slipstream of an old bus, or drummed your fingers in a jam for half an hour, sucking hard on the tailpipe of the car in front? Ever regretted breathing in just a bit too deeply as another filthy truck wheezed by? Have you coughed or sneezed into your handkerchief and made the mistake of peeping, with hair-rising horror, at the nasty, black, Jackson Pollock of a mass youve just hurled up?

Maybe it feels like a commendable public service youre doing, cleaning the air one breath at a time? After all, the filth you inhale from those dirty diesels lodges in your lungs, so the air you exhale is far nicer. You might be a kind of human Hoover, but dont be fooled into thinking youre making the world any cleaner. Even if all the people in a megacity like Mumbai sponged up all the pollution they breathed in, theyd still be cleaning as little as 0.01 per cent of the air swirling around them.

And the other catch, of course, is that your lungs clean the air at your own expense. If youre reading these words somewhere in an average world-class city, air pollution is shortening your life by anything from a few months to a few years. Collectively, the air we prize the breath of life that keeps us alive is positively toxic. Its killing more people prematurely than almost anything else on the planet: the equivalent of 710 million each year, which is five times more than road accidents, three times more than tobacco smoke, fifteen times more than all wars and violence and more than malaria and Aids combined. Thats 2,500 times as many people as died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, every single year. The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) coronavirus that swept the world in 2020 was initially predicted to kill about 20 million but in the noise and the panic, we forget that air pollution kills five times that many every decade. Polluted air is now heavily implicated in six of the worlds top ten causes of death; not just obvious lung and breathing problems, but heart disease, cancers, stroke and dementia. These bald statistics mask a vast human cost. Any of the worlds millions of air pollution deaths could follow years of chronic suffering: if dirty air is going to kill you, medical research suggests it will make your life smoulder for a decade before it snuffs the wick out for good.

You can see the effects of air pollution wherever you look, however you measure. In Delhi, test-match cricketers gratefully gasp from oxygen cylinders while they wait in the safety of the pavilion. In parts of China, filthy air will kill you five years too soon. In Hong Kong, the smog is sometimes so grim that tourists stand in front of giant, sunny photographs of the city to take their selfies instead. In Mongolia, winter air pollution is strongly linked to high rates of miscarriage. In Europe, national governments are allowed a certain number of excessive pollution episodes each year; in London, the British burn through their entire annual quota during the first week of January. According to the World Health Organization, 92 per cent of the worlds people live in places where its air quality guidelines arent met. Youre probably among them.

Sometimes the effects of pollution are easy to spot: think soot-blackened city streets or praying cathedral angels blurred to gargoyles by acid in the air. From the Colosseum to the Taj Mahal, powerfully toxic air is cracking and staining the worlds oldest buildings, turning priceless heritage our collective civilised memory to dust. Just as often, its a case of out-of-sight, out-of-mind: although the pollution we make here and now might not bother us immediately, it can cause problems half a world away and half a century in the future. In the last few years, for example, agricultural researchers have found that ground-level ozone pollution from North America is responsible for the loss of 1.2 million tonnes of wheat each year in Europe. Others have found intriguing links between decades-old lead pollution (from paint and poisonous vehicle fuel) and patterns of crime and antisocial behaviour in no fewer than seven separate countries.

Figure 1. Air pollution is one of the worlds biggest killers. When we fully understand the health problems it contributes to, it may even turn out to be the biggest killer of them all. Figures in brackets show millions of deaths per year. Source: World Health Organization.

Compelling1 though these arguments sound, not everyone is persuaded by them. Isnt nature one of our biggest polluters? What about hay fever? Doesnt it affect more children (roughly 40 per cent) than traffic? What about Icelandic volcanoes that spew out sudden smoke, like the one in 2010 that grounded 100,000 European flights with little or no warning? How about bushfires? Farm pollution? Dust from the desert? Now this is all true, but if you crunch the numbers, youll still find the number of deaths from human-caused pollution exceeds natural-pollution deaths by a factor of ten.

Perhaps you think pollution is nothing new and therefore nothing to worry about an irritating throwback to the Industrial Revolution? Youd be half right, at least. Air pollution is as old as human history, dating back around a million years to the first use of fire; but 300 years after the invention of the steam engine arguably the dirtiest machine ever developed it remains the biggest environmental threat to public health. Though parts of the world are indisputably cleaner today than they were during Victorian times, the problem of pollution has never really gone away. The unavoidable reality of us being so many, on such a small planet, is that were constantly recycling the same air and inventing ever more ways to make it dirty.

The history of air pollution includes plenty of denial that it was ever really a problem. Back in the 1880s, Chicago coal magnate Colonel W.P. Rend proudly boasted: Smoke is the incense burning on the altars of industry. It is beautiful to me You cant stop it. A century later, US President Ronald Reagan mounted a robust defence of the right to pollute in the name of economic progress: Approximately 80 per cent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so lets not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources. At best, thats a non-sequitur: Reagan was right that trees pollute, but wrong to conclude it grants us a licence to pollute as well. Trees cant help themselves; we can. If money is your measure and you think pollution a price worth paying for progress, which is what Reagan was really arguing, you need to consider the World Banks finding that dirty air costs the planet $5 trillion a year, including $225 billion in lost work days alone. Thats about a third of the