Did you know? The cost of air pollution


• Every year, an estimated 6 to 7 million people die prematurely because of exposure to air pollution (UNEP 2019a). In Asia and the Pacific about 4 billion people, who make up 92 per cent of the region’s population, are exposed to levels of air pollution that pose a significant risk to their health (UNEP 2018a).


• Over 90 per cent of the people in the world are estimated to breathe polluted air, with the worst air pollution levels in the Eastern Mediterranean Region and South-East Asia (WHO 2018a; WHO 2018b). Emissions from motor vehicles, fossil fuel power plants, industrial activities, slash-and-burn agriculture, deforestation and many other activities in both urban and rural areas make it nearly impossible for many people today to avoid air pollution.


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• Air pollution represents a huge economic burden, especially in highly urbanized countries. The cost of premature deaths, in welfare costs, due to air pollution has been estimated at around USD 5 trillion (UNEP 2019a).


• Pollution leading to ground-level or tropospheric ozone pollution could reduce the yield of crops such as wheat, soybean and corn by up to 26 per cent by 2030 (Avnery et al. 2011).


• Around USD 4.7 trillion was spent by governments in 2015 to subsidize fossil fuel production. It is estimated that efficient fossil fuel pricing would have reduced global carbon emissions by 28 per cent and fossil fuel pollution-related deaths by 46 per cent (International Monetary Fund 2019).


Climate change


The world’s youth are seeing the impacts of a changing climate and are speaking up. Because the atmosphere is warming as a result of GHG emissions, the climate has become more unpredictable locally, regionally and globally (Nature 2017; Schiermeier 2018). Until now, human civilization has never experienced a period with these levels of GHG concentrations or such intense environmental changes (IPCC 2018; UNEP 2019a).


We can expect to see even more severe climate change in the future. Global average temperatures are more than 1.0°C higher than a century ago, and this warming is accelerating (IPCC 2018). Twenty of the warmest years on record occurred in the past 22 years, with the years 2015-2018 the four warmest on record (World Meteorological Organization 2018; United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] 2019a). A child born today could experience a world more than four degrees warmer than the pre- industrial average, with the impacts of climate


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