Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and death in the world today, responsible for an estimated 9mn premature deaths, a recent report by The Lancet medical journal has shown.
Most of these deaths happened through heart diseases, stroke, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), researchers said.
The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health also noted that almost all pollution-linked deaths - around 92% were in poor or middle-income countries.
From filthy air to contaminated water, environmental pollution is killing more people in the world, more than smoking, hunger or natural disasters, and even more than Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined.
They warn that exposure to high levels of air pollution – especially over many years – can take a toll on human respiratory and inflammatory systems, with possibilities of heart diseases, stroke and lung cancer.
The financial cost from pollution-related death, sickness and welfare is equally massive, the report says, costing some $4.6tn in annual losses – or about 6.2% of the global economy.
For decades, pollution and its harmful effects on people’s health, the environment, and the planet have been neglected both by policymakers across the world and the international development agenda.
Areas like Sub-Saharan Africa have yet to even set up air pollution monitoring systems. Soil pollution has received scant attention.
And there are still plenty of potential toxins still being ignored, with less than half of the 5,000 new chemicals widely dispersed throughout the environment since 1950 having been tested for safety or toxicity.
Asia and Africa are the regions putting the most people at risk, the study found, while India tops the list of individual countries.
In the case of India, one out of every four premature deaths in the country in 2015, or some 2.5mn, was attributed to pollution, the study found.
The findings come at a time when air pollution levels in India have spiked following bursting of firecrackers during the Hindu festival Diwali.
China’s environment was the second deadliest, with more than 1.8mn premature deaths, or one in five, blamed on pollution-related illness.
Several other countries such Bangladesh, Pakistan, North Korea, South Sudan and Haiti also see nearly a fifth of their premature deaths caused by pollution.
Forty experts who co-authored the report say that pollution is not the inevitable consequence of economic development, and applying similar legislation and regulation from high-income countries to low- and middle-income countries could help in improving and protecting the health of the citizens as countries develop.
The Lancet report highlights the perils of pursuing a development agenda, ignoring the environment. Economic development must not be at the cost of environment around us.
It is time policymakers and governments around the world, particularly in developing countries, woke up and start finding innovative solutions to the critical, life-threatening problem.
Certainly, pollution is much more than an environmental challenge - it is a profound and pervasive threat that affects many aspects of human health and well-being.
