Part Three / How it Affects Us

3.4 Air Pollution

All online sources accessed on

  1. Exposure to elevated levels of both fine particulate matter and ozone Burnett, R., et al., ‘Global estimates of mortality associated with long-term exposure to outdoor fine particulate matter’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115 (38), 2018: 9592–7; Vohra, K., et al., ‘Global mortality from outdoor fine particle pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion: Results from GEOS-Chem, Environmental Research’, Environmental Research, 195, 2021: Article 110754, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2021.110754; Seltzer, K. M., et al., ‘Measurement-based assessment of health burdens from long-term ozone exposure in the United States, Europe, and China’, Environmental Research Letters, 13 (10), 2018: Article 104018, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aae29d; Shindell, D., et al., ‘Quantified, localized health benefits of accelerated carbon dioxide emissions reductions’, Nature Climate Change, 8 (4), 2018: 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0108-y.

    Stopping the burning of fossil fuels for energy Vohra et al., ‘Global mortality from outdoor fine particle pollution’.

    Indoor air pollution is estimated to kill roughly 3.2 million World Health Organization, ‘Household air pollution and health’, 8 May 2018, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/household-air-pollution-and-health.

  2. roughly 30 per cent of global methane emissions Saunois, M., et al., ‘The global methane budget 2000–2017’, Earth System Science Data, 12 (3), 2020: 1561–623, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-1561-2020

    about 500,000 premature deaths a year Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. V. Masson-Delmotte et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press), https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/; Climate and Clean Air Coalition and United Nations Environment Programme, Global Methane Assessment: Benefits and Costs of Mitigating Methane Emissions, 2021, https://www.ccacoalition.org/en/resources/global-methane-assessment-full-report.

  3. clean-air benefits … would outweigh the costs Shindell, D., et al., ‘Temporal and spatial distribution of health, labor, and crop benefits of climate change mitigation in the United States’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (46), 2021: Article e2104061118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2104061118.

    60–65 per cent of these benefits would still be realized Ibid.