India and China accounted for more than half of the total 60 lakh deaths caused by air pollution across the world in 2016, according to a report released by the US-based Health Effects Institute.
The report said Beijing and New Delhi had the highest numbers of deaths “attributable to PM2.5”. “Together, these two countries accounted for 51% of the total global PM2.5-attributable deaths,” read the findings, published in the State of Global Air 2018 report.
PM or particulate matter is a fine mixture of solids and liquid droplets in the air, and PM 2.5 are a category of the pollutants that are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, which means they are small enough to lodge themselves into the lungs.
The report also said India and China had the most number of people exposed to household air pollution in 2016 – 56 crore people in India and 41 crore people in China. In India, the household burning of biomass was responsible for about 24% of all PM2.5 levels.
This indoor air pollution contributed to one in four pollution deaths in India and one in five in China. South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, “experienced the steepest increases in air pollution levels since 2010”, the report said.
The findings reveal that more than 95% of the world’s population live in areas where the air they breathe is unsafe and the poorest communities are affected the most.
Across the world, breathing in particulate matter in the air was responsible for about 41 lakh early deaths from heart disease and stroke, lung cancer, chronic lung diseases, and respiratory infections, the report said. Further, household air pollution contributed to about 26 lakh deaths worldwide.
Bob O’Keefe, the vice-president of Health Effects Institute, however, said it was not an entirely grim picture, and there were “reasons for optimism, though there is a long way to go”, The Guardian reported.
“China seems to be now moving pretty aggressively, for instance in cutting coal and on stronger controls,” he said. “India has really begun to step up on indoor air pollution, for instance through the provision of LPG as a cooking fuel, and through electrification.”
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