- Sunday, May 19, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE poorest 10 per cent of India’s population is at a far bigger risk of dying from air pollution than the richest 10 per cent, one research released on Monday (26) said, according to AFP. The danger they face is almost nine times more than that faced by their richest counterparts.
The study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, estimated that air pollution from outside and inside sources caused deaths of 1.19 million people in 2010, the last year for which emissions and expenditure data were directly comparable.
Fine particles (PM2.5) generated from burning of fossil fuels, farming practices and wood-burning stoves lead to several health problems and are responsible for most of the eight million deaths caused by air pollution globally every year.
AFP added that previous research showed that the richest people bear an outsized responsibility for air pollution caused by their consumption-heavy lifestyles.
Researchers in Europe and the US wanted to see how wealth is linked to air pollution exposure in India, the world’s second-most populous nation. They went through data expenditure for different income groups and used a sophisticated computer model to see the level of pollution such spending habits were likely to have caused.
They then made a map of anticipated air pollution and used it to generate the estimates of related health impacts.
The team found that while individuals with higher net worth contributed most to air-pollution levels, it was the poor who suffered the most.
The researchers also came up with a new pollution inequity index, which measured the ratio of premature deaths against the ‘amount of ambient air pollution’ that each income group contributed, the AFP report added.
For the highest-earning 10 per cent, the index predicted an estimated 6.3 premature deaths per unit of pollution it contributed. For the poorest 10 percent, that figure was as high as 54.7 deaths, almost nine times more.
The team also examined two ways to reduce air inequality – applying clean technology to all pollution sources except cooking stoves and replacing solid-fuel stoves with electric ones. The second way was found to be more effective in reducing deaths caused by air pollution.
“A single intervention that would effectively address air pollution-related deaths, especially for the poor: offering cheap, clean cooking stoves and fuels,” Fabian Wagner, lead study author from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, told AFP.
With millions of Indians shifting from rural areas to cities in search of work since 2010, Wagner said it was challenging to quantify the net effect air pollution was leaving on that migration.
“Urbanisation leads to higher population densities — i.e. more people getting exposed to the same bad air,” he said, adding, “Hence, total exposure may go up.”
