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Diseases caused by pollution killed more than 9 million people in 2015, accounting for 16% of all deaths worldwide. It is three times more deaths than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined, and 15 times more than wars and other violence. If these numbers surprise you, it may be because your first idea is that pollution means dirty air. Or you can think of contaminated water. In reality, pollution is both one of these things and much more, and it is only now that the first global effort to evaluate all forms is finally calculating these sobering figures.
Between productivity losses and health care, pollution costs about $ 5 trillion a year, or more than 6% of global economic output. It's just to have counted what we know. The vast majority of the more than 140,000 chemicals and pesticides that have entered the environment since 1950 have not yet been tested, but could pose a threat. Epidemiologists today understand that pollution is a substance in the air, water or soil that can harm human health.
These are just a few teeth on the megalodon of a report called The Lancet The Commission on Pollution and Health, which was published in October 2017. This was the first global badessment of "the neglected daughter-in-law who is pollution," says Philip Landrigan, pediatrician and epidemiologist who co-directed the commission. In response to this negligence, the British medical journal The Lancet then badembled a team of 52 people composed of economists, doctors, nutritionists, a princess from Thailand and a former president of Mexico. They combined data from major organizations, including the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Google Earth, with hundreds of country and city surveys.
The report is another "my God" moment in the 47 years of Landrigan's plumbing pollution. His studies in the early 1970s on the effects of lead on children's IQ prompted the US government to ban leaded gasoline. His research on the first responders of September 11, 2001 linked the inhalation of toxic dust with cancer. Not only Lancet According to a report, pollution is "the biggest environmental cause of morbidity and mortality in the world," also determined that pollution prevention around the world was a "win-win battle" and had torpedoed the "tale of the old woman "(Landrigan's words) it hurts savings. (For example, the EPA found that since 1970, every dollar spent on air pollution control in the United States has yielded about $ 30 in benefits.) Like Air Pollution Research , soils and water had been so piecemeal that the report had been surprised many of us who have spent their careers studying pollution, "says Landrigan. "It was clear that our work should continue and develop."
This expansion is the global observatory on pollution and health, led by Landrigan. A partnership between UN Environment, Boston College and Harvard T.H The Chan School of Public Health, the first observatory of its kind, opened in September this year. He will continue to gather the LancetReal-time pollution data sources, recommends country-specific policies and conducts research around the world. Its first two studies, to be released later this year, examine the effects of ocean pollution on global health and human capital losses from air pollution in India, where at least 140 million people regularly breathe more than 10 times the safety limit set by WHO. "Not solving the problem of pollution will prevent modern society from surviving," Landrigan says. "It will make people sick. It will shorten people's lives. This will reduce children's intelligence and prevent them from contributing adequately to society.
But why is a centralized command against pollution only launched now? On the one hand, defining pollution has been a polluted business. Latin polluere ("To pollute, contaminate"), "pollution" was for centuries strictly badociated with social or spiritual defilement. The preferred definition of Middle English, for example, was "the emission of sperm at times other than coitus". The smog, sludge and sludge of the industrial revolution have inspired more scientific uses. But chemists, ecologists, and decision-makers with opposing interests and limited tools struggled to badyze what they were trying to describe and resorted to woolly terms as "foreign matter" with "adverse effects" or "adverse effects". foreign substances "resulting in" unnatural changes ".
Tellingly, the Cuyahoga River fire that helped ignite the environmental movement 50 years ago was in fact at least the 13th time pollutants lit the river in 100 years. Prior to 1969, people lacked both motivation to clean up and know exactly what needed to be cleaned up, or why they should be concerned about it. According to a 1978 report by the National Academy of Sciences, "affixing a" pollutant "label to a specific material requires considerable knowledge of its impact on the environment; knowledge that, for the most part, is lacking. "
In the decades that followed, "our ability to measure pollution has grown by leaps and bounds," says Landrigan. Satellite imagery allows researchers to "collect huge volumes of data in a matter of hours, which would have taken months or years if you had only used it in the past." Sampling on the ground. The clbadification of the EPA, first in 1997, PM2 persistent and easily inhaled .5 – particles with a diameter less than 2.5 micrometers, or about 3% of the diameter of 39. a human hair – have made pollution much more quantifiable. And biomonitoring technology can now measure hundreds of chemicals in the human body. Over the past decade, says Landrigan, "we have learned that airborne air pollution causes not only lung disease, but also heart disease and stroke, chronic kidney disease, diabetes, and maybe even dementia.
The lancet
The observatory will use the Lancet the definition of the ratio of pollution: "undesirable, often dangerous material, which is introduced into the Earth's environment as a result of human activities, which threatens human health and harms ecosystems." Concrete and qualified, the first word invites to an intense politics, social, economic and metaphysical debate.
Pollution also remains in the shadows, says Landrigan, because "all the attention was given to climate change". However, several recent efforts have elevated the status of pollution to the global agenda, with not only the Lancet report, but also the work of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and the first World Conference on Air Pollution of the World Health Organization last year.
Although pollution and climate change are closely linked, the observatory will emphasize two differences to strengthen the urgency. The first distinction is how it describes the lethal potential of pollution. As climate change kills an estimated 250,000 people a year between 2030 and 2050, "pollution kills millions of people here and now," says Landrigan. The only air pollution, which currently kills seven million people a year, is expected to double the number of destructions by 2050. The second concerns its approach to solutions. "Pollution is much easier to fix than climate change," he adds. "Pollution could be fixed in 15 or 20 years in most countries of the world. In the United States, we have seen a 70% decrease in pollution since the Clean Air Act. … We know what to do and the tools we use here are ready to be used around the world today. "Global warming is exacerbating pollution, but the observatory will first and foremost develop a strategy for pollution-specific policies.
According to Landrigan, these policies include immediate measures, such as the imposition of chimney washers on all coal-fired plants. "The Trump administration is moving away from dust collectors, and that's a big mistake," says Landrigan. "It's not a political statement. It is an affirmation based on human health considerations. "Long-term measures typically include coal reduction and" creating incentives to accelerate the transition to electricity generation from renewable energies ".
Not everyone is optimistic about the solvency of pollution and questions the optimism of the observatory. "We will not move gasoline vehicles to bicycles in the next 20 years," says Jonathan Samet, an epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health. "And with everything going from China to Iceland, you can not create a global standard that works for all."
"Observatory" is also a bit unfit. His seat is not a Captain Planetdome of screens displaying pollution crises in real time. For now, this is the small office in Landrigan, located in a university building in Chestnut Hill, Mbadachusetts, with a stack of research papers and a whiteboard. And there are many things that the observatory can not see. the Lancet Report created a concept called "the pollutome", the sum of all types of pollution "that could harm human health".
What we know is the tip of the polluting iceberg that is nine million deaths a year. At the base are poorly studied materials, thousands of synthetic chemicals widely used today "that CDCs detect in most people and whose toxicity has never been tested," says Landrigan.
Determining which materials at the base belong to the summit can take years, stealing untold lives along the way. "The biggest problem is what are we exposed to what are the implications for health?" Adds Samet. "I'm afraid it's a bit like smoking. When we discovered that smoking caused lung cancer, we had millions and millions of smokers. Fortunately, places like the observatory aim to avoid this. "
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