Seven million people die each year from illnesses attributable to air pollution, yet it has never had global recognition in the same way as Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, and now there are growing calls from the health sector for that to change.
Relative to other health issues that have access to billion-dollar global funds, air pollution has a far greater health impact, said Christa Hasenkopf, the director of clean air programmes at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (Epic).
Pollution contributes to millions of deaths every year from conditions such as heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancer or pneumonia. That exceeds the 630,000 who died of Aids in 2022, the 608,000 malaria deaths in the same year and even the 1 million who die annually as a result of diarrhoea.
Sunil Dahiya, a south Asia analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, said: “It’s a slow poison; you slowly move towards death and, because of the slow nature of this pandemic, we globally have not been able to respond to it the way we should.”
Less than 1% of international development finance and philanthropic funding goes towards air pollution, according to the Clean Air Fund. Chad, Iraq and Pakistan are the top three most-polluted countries…
…EPIC plans to launch a fund later this year to focus on data gaps. According to OpenAQ, just 38% of countries share real-time air quality data, so policymakers don’t have the evidence they need. Raising an annual $4m-$8m (£3.2m-£6.3m) from donors would make “a huge dent” in changing that, Hasenkopf said, adding that open data allows better-informed interventions.