The global community faces massive challenges, but none are anticipated to cause as much large-scale destruction, worsen existing inequities across and within households, cities and countries, and simultaneously test human collaboration and innovation as climate change. The unprecedented scope and scale of climatic impacts present a clear and present danger to our shared planet. Sadly, there is ample evidence that the immediate costs of climatic adversities will be felt more deeply by the most marginalised, who lack safety nets and resilience measures to adapt to extreme climatic change.
As the 27th annual gathering of the two-week long UN Conference of Parties (COP) on climate change has gotten off to a start, there is a need to acknowledge that the 34 years since the UN General Assembly’s adoption of its first resolution on climate change as a “common concern of mankind” represents the largest inter-generational human health failure of our time. Our collective failure to act conclusively to curb climate change continues to condemn the poorest and most vulnerable among us who have contributed the least to the problem of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to suffer the most. What is also hard to refute is that poor and vulnerable lives will continue to be devastated if COP27 ignores the costs of the largest environmental health risk – air pollution -- faced by many cities and countries around the world.
Now more than ever before, there is a global urgency in responding to the needs of those who are doubly threatened by exposure to toxic levels of fossil fuel pollution and vulnerabilities to climatic adversities such as extreme heat waves, droughts, flash floods and coastal zone inundation. As climate negotiators and activists have descended on Sharm El Sheik, Egypt, to attend COP27, it is necessary to ask what is being done about practical, effective measures and protocols to curb air pollution, which currently devastates millions across the globe.
The toll of disease and morbidity burdens accruing at the toxic and tragic intersection of fossil fuel air pollution and climatic adversity presents a global imperative that requires looking beyond the late night, textual parsing of three decades of inter-governmental COP negotiations toward concrete actions to reduce fossil fuel-related particulate matter (PM) air pollution and curb short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs). SLCPs are powerful climate forcers with global warming potentials many times that of carbon dioxide and they are also toxic air pollutants. The four key SLCPs: Black Carbon (BC) methane (CH4), tropospheric ozone (O3) and HFCs are commonly associated with emissions from solid-fuel cooking fires, biomass burning, agricultural practices, coal, oil, natural gas, diesel use and refrigeration.
For those who live at the intersection of a lack of access to clean energy and extreme vulnerability to adverse climatic impacts, breathing toxic PM emissions from fossil fuels comes with a definitive burden of death and disease. The scope of PM air pollution and the missed opportunities to address this challenge within the UN climate negotiations framework underscore a development reality that marginalised households and communities lack adaptive resilience, the ability to relocate to neighbourhoods where the air is cleaner, as well as access to necessary public health services. As our planet continues to urbanise at unprecedented levels, there is a concentration of air pollution-related disease and morbidity burdens in households/communities that have been historically marginalised, and also predominantly in megacities across Asia and Africa.
From the perspective of decades of scientific consensus generated by numerous globally-relevant institutions including six, successive Assessment Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is important to be absolutely clear that emissions reductions of SLCPs cannot substitute for energy sector-related GHG emissions mitigation. But ignoring the grave impacts of SLCPs, and discounting the regional and national benefits for health and food security that result from SLCP emission reductions makes no practical sense from the perspective of reducing poverty and climate vulnerability. Integrated partnerships to curb SLCPs and recognition of the same within climate commitments made by countries and businesses that reflect the needs of the most populous cities of the world need to be factored into the COP27 negotiations. One of the most influential networks/coalitions focused on the nexus between curbing SCLPs and climate action is the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC). It includes a diverse array of stakeholders ranging from countries, cities, NGOs and the private sector. India announced it was joining the CCAC during its 2019 World Environment Day celebrations. India has a historic window of opportunity to lead COP27 negotiations toward action that can improve access to clean air and ensure climate-responsive action to curb SLCPs.
(The writer is the author of ‘Air Pollution, Clean Energy and Climate Change’, Wiley UK, 2022)