Families in Flint, Michigan, have been poisoned by drinking lead-laced water because officials appear to have knowingly disregarded the lead poisoning. Opportunities to reduce lead levels were blatantly ignored by those who do not have to pay the tragic costs of being poisoned. What happened in Flint is a brutal reality that poorer communities, and the youngest among such communities, tend to be the most vulnerably exposed to pollution and toxic contamination.
Flint’s declaration of financial emergency from 2010, and its demographic profile – which the New York Times editorialist Charles Blow referred to as “mostly black and disproportionately poor”- are indeed not coincidences- they are glaringly sad markers of the intersection between poverty and pollution.
The disproportionate double burden of poverty and pollution cuts across poor communities everywhere. But, what is happening in vastly poorer villages damaged as a result of their heavy dependence on polluting energy sources - where literally millions are being smothered by a toxic cauldron of indoor air pollution?
Where is the global urgency in resp-onding to the long-standing concern that household air pollution resulting from the burning of solid fuels (wood, crop wastes, charcoal, coal and dung) destroys the lives of poor women and children who spend a disproportionate amount of time in front of polluted hearths?
In 2014, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that 7 million people died - one in eight of total global deaths – as a result of indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure. This finding based on a 2012 data, more than doubles previous estimates, and confirms that air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk.
Indoor/household air pollution was linked to 4.3 million deaths in 2012, but the impacts of indoor air pollution were found to be staggeringly disproportionate: Low and middle income countries in South-East Asia and Western Pacific suffered the greatest burden of 3.3 million deaths linked to indoor air pollution; and 50 per cent of premature deaths among children under age five was due to pneumonia caused by particulate matter (soot) inhaled from household air pollution. In poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor smoke was found to be 100 times higher than acceptable levels for small soot particles- PM 2.5.
Measuring 2.5 micrometres or less, PM 2.5 has been directly linked with causing strokes, ischaemic heart disease; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lung cancer. Reducing PM 2.5 emissions is critically important from a human health perspective, but what is often not reflected is that one of the principal components of PM 2.5- black carbon –emitted as a result of the incomplete combustion of solid fuels is known to be a short -term climate pollutant.
What has largely not been addressed is that black carbon emissions are also directly linked to serious, adverse regional and in some cases, more localised climate change impacts including regional rainfall and weather patterns, and also most importantly in the loss of annual production levels of rice, wheat and maize. Curbing PM 2.5/black carbon emissions offers a win-win on two different fronts.
Reducing polluting energy in poor households happens to also offer short term climate change benefits. So, why has so little been done so far about a problem that affects so many? Clean energy measures such as the use of clean-burning biomass stoves, and use of clean energy cook-stoves using modern and renewable energy sources are two specific measures that have long been touted, but for equally long remain unmet.
In 2010, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GACC), set an ambitious goal of ‘100 by 20’ – that is 100 million homes with clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020. Now, in the second month of 2016, the question is how has this goal progressed in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where the majority of the “energy poor” reside? The International Energy Agency (2011) estimated that 72 per cent and 88 per cent of the population in India and Bangladesh, respectively, rely on solid fuels for cooking.
Worrying statistics
A 2013 study commissioned by the GACC found for instance that despite the large market potential for clean cookstoves in India, there “are a limited number of players in the market and few have reached scale”.
More worryingly, this 2013 study estimated that 8,75,000 deaths occur annually in India due to indoor air pollution which accounts for 1/4th of the deaths caused globally, with approximately 5,25,000 deaths attributed to acute lower respiratory infections and about 3,50,000 deaths attributed due to chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases.
Year 2016 began with two of the world’s most populous countries worrying about dangerously high levels of PM 2.5 pollution, but attention was focused primarily on vehicular emissions, and not on toxic household hearths. This year is also when countries will need to demonstrate their commitments towa-rds meeting the first ever inclusive global climate change agreement. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement does not contain an exact mechanism that can simultaneously curb short term climate pollu-tants and deliver on the promise of clean energy for all at the household level.
New public-private initiatives such as: the Breakthrough Energy Coalition which jointly prioritise combating climate change and providing access to clean energy technologies for the poor; and the International Solar Alliance comprising 121 countries and launched jointly by India and France are promising. They will join a burgeoning field of initiatives that promise to deliver clean energy services.
But what concrete delivery and implementation linkages are being made across the gamut of well-intentioned clean energy partnerships/initiatives? Coordinated and verifiable global action that simultaneously results in delivering clean energy for all, and implementing measures that curb short term climate pollutants can save millions of lives and provide climate change benefits. Delaying scaled up action only heaps inequitable costs to be paid by the poorest and youngest among us.
(Cherian is the author of “Energy and Global Climate Change: Bridging the Sustainable Development Divide)
Published 07 February 2016, 17:52 IST