Clean air must be made a global priority

Left unchecked, toxic air will keep shortening millions of lives and harming health, says Jane Burston

Your article (Millions of Britons face higher risk of heart failure due to dirty air, study suggests, 8 September) is just the latest reminder that toxic air is a public health crisis. The evidence is piling up. There’s also fresh evidence that air pollution can drive devastating forms of dementia.

Left unchecked, toxic air will keep shortening lives and worsening health everywhere. But the good news is that solutions are at hand. Academics at Princeton University have recently shown that cutting pollution in the US could save thousands of lives each year.

At the global scale, cleaner air would avert millions of premature deaths each year. The World Bank estimates that targeted interventions could halve the number of people exposed to dangerous levels of pollution over the next 15 years. This May, health ministers committed to halving the burden of disease from man-made air pollution by 2040.

World leaders have gathered at the UN general assembly this week and debates there will be complex and contested. But the case for action on air pollution could not be simpler and clearer. Clean air must be treated as a global priority for health, with countries working together to prevent millions of avoidable deaths and to spare many millions more from the misery of living with heart disease, dementia, asthma, lung cancer and other chronic illnesses that are caused or exacerbated by air pollution.
Jane Burston
Chief executive, Clean Air Fund

Cover photo:  ‘The case for action on air pollution could not be simpler and clearer.’ Photograph: Getty