More than 500,000 people died in the EU in 2021 as a result of unclean air, and over half of those deaths could have been averted if pollution levels were reduced to the levels suggested by doctors, according to estimates.
Researchers from the European Environment Agency attributed 253,000 premature deaths to PM2.5 concentrations that exceeded the World Health Organization’s maximum recommendation limit of 5g/m3.
Meanwhile, excessive levels of nitrogen dioxide caused almost 52,000 deaths, while short-term exposure to growing levels of ozone caused 22,000 deaths.
“The figures released today by the EEA remind us that air pollution is still the number one environmental health problem in the EU,” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, the EU’s environment commissioner, reported The Guardian.
According to doctors, air pollution is one of the leading causes of human death; however, if the economies are cleaned up in the countries, the death toll will drop dramatically.
Between 2005 and 2021, the number of deaths caused by PM2.5 decreased by 41% across the EU, with the EU intending to attain a target of 55% by the end of the decade.
The World Health Organization, which revised air quality rules in 2021, declared that no level of air pollution is safe, although they have defined upper limits for specific pollutants.
Experts agree that pollution levels must be reduced in the EU
The European Parliament voted in September to match the EU’s air quality guidelines with the WHO’s but chose to postpone this until 2035.
“The good news is that clean air policy works, and our air quality is improving. But we need to do better still, and bring pollution levels down further,” said Sinkevicius.
For the first time, the EEA calculated the total disease burden caused by air pollution. While examining the raw mortality tolls, the researchers calculated how many more years the population would be living along with the diseases brought on by polluted air.
“When people get lung cancer, normally they die very quickly. For other diseases – especially asthma but also diabetes or also chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – there is also an important contribution of this state of living with disability,” said Alberto Gonzalez Ortiz, an EEA air pollution researcher.
“People can live for a long period in a bad condition. Considering only mortality, we were underestimating the impact of air pollution,” he added.