Air pollution costs Utahns billions annually and shortens life expectancy by two years

New study reveals the cost of air pollution for Utahns' health and pocketbooks

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

Research News

 

Air pollution has been a problem in Utah since before the territory was officially recognized as a state. The mountain valleys of this high elevation region are particularly vulnerable to the buildup of air pollution from vehicles, household heating and power production. Together with high per-capita energy use, this has resulted in periods of poor air quality. However, with so many types of pollution and regional conditions, determining the overall effects of air pollution on Utah's health and economy has been a major challenge. A new study from 23 Utah-based researchers, including five from the University of Utah, sought to do just that.

The study estimated that air pollution shortens the life of the average Utahn by around 2 years. And pollution costs Utah's economy around $1.9 billion annually. But many state-level actions, such as increasing vehicle and building efficiency, could reduce air pollution by double-digit percentages while benefitting the economy, the researchers found.

The team used an approach called expert assessment, which combines all available research and experience from published and unpublished scientific studies. Combining expertise from public health, atmospheric science and economics, the researchers assessed what types of disease and economic harm could stem from Utah's air pollution. The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Atmosphere in a special issue on air quality in Utah.

They estimated that air pollution in Utah causes between 2,500 and 8,000 premature deaths each year, decreasing the median life expectancy of Utahns by 1.1 to 3.6 years. This loss of life expectancy is distributed across most of the population, they found, rather than only affecting "sensitive groups." For example, 75% of Utahns may lose 1 year of life or more because of air pollution and 23% may lose 5 years or more.

This substantial health burden is caused by many illnesses and conditions that most people might not associate with air pollution. For example, exposure to particulates and other pollutants increases occurrence of heart and lung diseases, including congestive heart failure, heart attack, pneumonia, COPD and asthma. These conditions account for 62% of the pollution impact on health, according to this study. The remaining 38% of health effects are associated with stroke, cancer, reproductive harm to mothers and children, mental illness, behavioral dysfunction, immune disease, autism and other conditions--all exacerbated by exposure to dirty air.

On the economic side, the researchers estimated that the direct and indirect costs of air pollution cost Utahns around $1.9 billion dollars (in the range of $0.75-3.3 billion) annually. This economic damage results from direct effects such as healthcare expenses, damage to crops and lost earning potential, in addition to indirect costs such as loss of tourism, decreased growth and regulatory burdens.

"It was a real eye-opener to see quantitative estimates of how serious the health and economic costs of air pollution are for the people of Utah," said Isabella Errigo, lead author and a graduate student at Brigham Young University. "The consequences of dirty air can seem very abstract until you read the medical research connecting the quality of our environment to our personal health."

Even though the estimates of cost in this study are on the low end of national estimates, which range up to $9 billion a year for Utah, they are still much higher than figures commonly discussed in the legislature. For example, approximately $10 million was appropriated to clean Utah's air this year, representing only 0.1% to 0.5% of the costs of air pollution.

"Utahns understand that air pollution imposes large hidden costs on our communities which is why it's consistently ranked as a top concern," said Logan Mitchell, a research assistant professor at the U and a co-author of the study. "Thankfully, innovation has made clean energy technologies cost competitive on the market, without even considering those hidden costs. The coming energy transition will mean being good stewards of the environment will also protect our economy."

The mismatch between the size of the problem and the proposed solutions emphasizes one of the central findings from the study: cleaning the air could have immense health and economic benefits for Utah. The authors combined their estimates of cost with the air pollution goals from the recent Utah Roadmap to Clean Air, produced by the U's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. If Utah achieves the roadmap's pollution reduction targets, they estimate, Utah could save $500 million per year by 2030 and $1.1 billion per year by 2050.

"The payoff of reducing pollution would be huge in economic terms and the benefits would be incalculable in terms of human life and health," said senior author Ben Abbott, an assistant professor at BYU. "It's a question of choice. Are we going to settle for incremental progress in air quality or take advantage of this immense opportunity to improve the health of our communities and remove this enormous drag on our economy?"

"When I read these results, my thoughts immediately turn to my friends and family who live in Utah," said co-author Rebecca Frei, a graduate student at the University of Alberta. "My grandmother goes walking and my niece plays on the playground every day. Changing some simple things about how we operate means added years of life. To me, that's a no-brainer. This isn't about pushing an agenda, this is about assessing the evidence and acting out of love for our families and community."

The researchers ranked more than 30 recommendations of how to best reduce the amount of air pollution in Utah. At the top of the list: increase efficiency of vehicles and buildings, invest in awareness, remove subsidies for nonrenewable energy, require payment for pollution and expand alternative transportation. They estimated that each of these interventions could result in double-digit decreases in air pollution. The researchers suggested that changes at the state level and community level as the most effective and tractable.

The researchers cautioned that no single change would achieve the desired improvement in air quality alone. "We need long-term implementation of proven pollution control measures," Errigo said. "It's going to take commitment from multiple groups at city to state levels to clean up our air and prepare for future growth."

The findings of this study are directly in line with the recommendations of the Utah Road Map to Clean Air and add quantitative estimates of the health and economic costs. The researchers hope that these estimates provide additional context for state legislators and concerned citizens who want to enact positive change.

"In our efforts to clear the air there are no perfect answers, but there are practical solutions," said Thom Carter, Executive Director of the Utah Clean Air Partnership (UCAIR) and co-author on the study. "When looking at how poor air quality impacts our region, it is important to know that we are making progress and that each person, family, organization, and community can find ways to reduce emissions and improve our quality of life."

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Find the full study here.

Other co-authors include Daniel Mendoza, Kerry Kelly, Andrew Freeman and Heather Holmes from the U; Sayedeh Sara Sayedi, Jeffrey Glenn, John D. Beard, Samuel Bratsman, Robert A. Chaney, Mitchell Greenhalgh, James D. Johnston, Leslie Lange and Audrey Stacey from BYU;  Peter D. Howe, Randal Martin and Trang Tran from Utah State University; Andrew Follett from Yale Law School and Derrek Wilson from the University of Colorado, Boulder Law School.

Disclaimer: AAAS a

These Items in Your Home Are Harming America’s Sea Animals

A new report examines how plastic waste affects marine wildlife.

Hawaiian monk seals are one of more than a dozen species at risk of extinction that had ingested or were tangled in plastic.

Credit...Paulo Oliveira/Alamy


By Catrin Einhorn
Nov. 19, 2020, NYT


How severely the world’s plastic waste crisis is affecting marine wildlife is not fully understood, despite decades of research and gruesome images of whales’ bellies filled with plastic and a turtle with a straw lodged in its nostril. A new report by Oceana, a conservation group, illustrates some of what we know about how plastic affects sea turtles and marine mammals in United States waters.
The findings offer a glimpse of a larger problem.

The authors focused on sea turtles and marine mammals for practical reasons. These animals are federally protected, so when they are found in distress or wash up dead on a beach, responders are required to document it. By collecting data from government agencies and marine life organizations around the country, the authors found almost 1,800 cases of plastic entanglement or ingestion affecting 40 species since 2009.

But the report notes that the number is “a gross underestimate” because humans observe a tiny fraction of animal deaths in the ocean. Even so, of the nation’s 23 coastal states, it found cases in 21.

“This is the first time we’re looking at the problem from a U.S. perspective,” said Kimberly Warner, the report’s author and a senior scientist at Oceana. “This brings the problem home.”


In 2016, the United States produced more plastic waste than any other nation, and more of that plastic entered the ocean than previously thought, according to a recent study. As of 2015, less than a tenth of the world’s cumulative plastic waste had been recycled.

The Oceana report found that in the reported cases, 90 percent of the animals had swallowed plastic, and the rest were entangled in it. Necropsies often showed that the animals had died from blockages or lacerations. Other times, ingesting plastic may have simply weakened the animal or played no role in its death. Overall, in 82 percent of the cases, the animals died.


The culprits go beyond the usual suspects.

In the 1980s, environmental activists warned of the devastating effects of six-pack rings ensnaring sea animals. People started dutifully cutting them before disposal, and in 1994 the Environmental Protection Agency mandated that six-pack rings must be degradable, though the process may take months. Consumers have also been warned about releasing balloons, which can harm marine animals.

Recently some municipalities, counties and states have banned single-use plastic bags, one of the biggest contributors to ingestion and entanglements, according to the report. Plastic packing straps were found constricting the necks or bodies of seals and sea lions, naturally curious animals who may have gotten entangled while trying to play. Manatees ingested lots of fishing line.

But the report also found many more surprising items caused harm. Along the Gulf Coast, mesh produce bags were found in the guts of sea turtles and also entangling their bodies. In 2015, a loggerhead turtle in Georgia was found with a toothbrush and fork in its digestive tract, among other items. Two years later, another turtle was found in New York with a plastic dental flosser inside it. Food wrappers, sandwich bags, sponges, and even decorative plastic Easter grass were among the items discovered. A bottlenose dolphin in North Carolina had its head stuck in the hole of a flying disc. In Virginia, a DVD case lacerated the stomach of a sei whale.



A dead Laysan albatross chick on Midway Atoll in the Pacific.

Paulo Oliveira/Alamy

Many of the victims are endangered or threatened.

More than a dozen species at risk of extinction — including sea turtles, Hawaiian monk seals and sei whales — ingested or were tangled in plastic. Manatees, those gentle, slow-moving giants that graze on seagrass, made up 700 cases. The report quotes Brandon Bassett, a biologist at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, describing part of what he found inside one dead manatee: “Imagine a ball of plastic bags in the stomach, about the size of a cantaloupe, and then a bunch of plastic bags that were wrapped and almost like a rope that was about 3 feet long.”

Scientists are learning more about why animals consume plastic. To sea turtles, a floating plastic bag may resemble a jellyfish meal, but that doesn’t explain the bottle caps and hard plastic shards found in their digestive tracts or stool. One study suggested that plastic starts to smell appetizing as it becomes coated in algae and microorganisms.

In South Carolina, one ailing loggerhead passed almost 60 pieces of plastic through its digestive system during its rehabilitation at a sea turtle center. Juveniles are more at risk because of their size and undeveloped gastrointestinal tract. More than 20 percent of the sea turtles that had ingested plastic were just months old. Some were only a few days old. A recent Australian study found that just 14 pieces of plastic in their digestive tracts significantly increased sea turtles’ risk of death.

Still, plastic waste is not the biggest killer of marine life.

Humans have created all kinds of dire problems for sea animals: rising sea temperatures, fishermen hauling in unintended species, ship striking them, other marine pollution and habitat degradation.

“Plastic in and of itself may not be as big of a threat as we’re led to believe,” said Jesse Senko, an assistant research professor and senior sustainability scientist at Arizona State University. “The scientific community has not done a good enough job of really assessing these questions, looking beyond how it affects an individual animal.”


A green sea turtle on a debris-filled beach in Midway Atoll.

Credit...Caleb Jones/Associated Press

He believes that images of decomposing sea birds with bellies full of plastic lead the public and media to focus on plastic even when other threats are more significant.

Ultimately, plastics and rising sea temperatures are connected; after all, the vast majority of plastic is derived from fossil fuels.

The Oceana report calls on national, state and local governments to restrict the production of single-use plastics and it asks companies to offer consumers plastic-free options.

“I’m old enough to remember a time when it didn’t permeate everything in my life,” Dr. Warner said. “And yet it’s built up at an alarming rate.

Japan faces another Fukushima disaster crisis

November 3rd, 2020, by Paul Brown

Collecting sea water samples near the damaged Fukushima nuclear power station.

 Image: By IAEA Imagebank, via Wikimedia Commons

A plan to dump a million tonnes of radioactive water from the Fukushima disaster off Japan is alarming local people.

LONDON, 3 November, 2020 − The Japanese government has an unsolvable problem: what to do with more than a million tonnes of water contaminated with radioactive tritium, in store since the Fukushima disaster and growing at more than 150 tonnes a day.

The water, contained in a thousand giant tanks, has been steadily accumulating since the nuclear accident in 2011. It has been used to cool the three reactors that suffered a meltdown as a result of the tsunami that hit the coast.

Tritium is a radioactive element produced as a by-product by nuclear reactors under normal operation, and is present everywhere in the fabric of the reactor buildings, so water used for cooling them is bound to be contaminated by it.

To avoid another potentially catastrophic meltdown in the remaining fuel the cooling has to continue indefinitely, so the problem continues to worsen. The government has been told that Japan will run out of storage tanks by 2022.

Announcement delayed

As often happens when governments are faced with difficult problems, the unpalatable decision to release the contaminated water into the sea has not been formally announced, but the intention of the government to take this course has been leaked and so widely reported.

Immediately both local and worldwide adverse reaction has resulted. There are the direct effects on the local fishermen who fear that no one will want to buy their catch, but over a wider area the health effects are the main concern.

As ever with the nuclear industry, there are two widely different views on tritium. The Health Physics Society says it is a mildly radioactive element that is present everywhere, and doubts that people will be affected by it. But the Nuclear Information and Resource Service believes tritium is far more dangerous and increases the likelihood of cancers, birth defects and genetic disorders.

The issue is further complicated because the Fukushima wastewater contains a number of other radionuclides, not in such high quantities, but sufficient to cause damage. Ian Fairlie, an independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment, is extremely concerned about Japan’s plans and the health of the local people.

“Ten half-lives for tritium is 123 years: that’s how long these tanks will have to last – at least. This will allow time also for politicians to reflect on the wisdom of their support for nuclear power”

In a detailed assessment of the situation he says other highly dangerous radioactive substances, including caesium-137 and strontium-90, are also in the water stored at Fukushima.

They are in lower quantities than the tritium, he says, but still unacceptably high – up to 100 times above the legally permitted limit. All these radionuclides decay over time − some take thousands of years − but tritium decays faster, the danger from it halving every 12.3 years.

In a briefing for the Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA), a UK based organisation, another independent analyst, Tim Deere-Jones, discusses research that shows that tritium binds with organic material in plants and animals.

This is potentially highly damaging to human health because it travels up the food chain in the marine environment, specifically accumulating in fish. This means fish-eating communities on the Japanese coast could ingest much larger quantities of tritium than some physicists think likely.

Relying on dilution

Tim Deere-Jones is also concerned that the tritium will be blown inshore on the prevailing wind in sea spray and will bio-accumulate in food plants, making it risky to eat crops as far as ten miles inland. Because of the potential dangers of releasing the water the NFLA has asked the Japanese government to reconsider its decision.

The government has not yet responded though, because officially it is still considering what to do. However, it is likely to argue that pumping the contaminated water into the sea is acceptable because it will be diluted millions of times, and anyway seawater does already contain minute quantities of tritium.

Dr Fairlie is among many who think this is too dangerous, but he admits there are no easy solutions.

He says: “Barring a miraculous technical discovery which is unlikely, I think TEPCO/Japanese Gov’t [TEPCO is the Tokyo Electric Power Company, owner of the Fukushima Daiichi plant]  will have to buy more land and keep on building more holding tanks to allow for tritium decay to take place. Ten half-lives for tritium is 123 years: that’s how long these tanks will have to last – at least.

“This will allow time not only for tritium to decay, but also for politicians to reflect on the wisdom of their support for nuclear power.” − Climate News Network

Australian forests’ smoke climbed 

20 miles in 2019

November 4th, 2020, by Tim Radford

Near to Sydney, far from the fires, the smoke was still thick enough to obscure the sun. 

Image: By simonrumi (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons

Blazing Australian forests made their mark high in the stratosphere and cast a cloud that lingered for months.

LONDON, 4 November, 2020 − Australian forests, devoured by devastating wildfires in the last southern hemisphere summer, set a new high − a huge smoke cloud that soared more than 20 miles into the upper atmosphere and stayed there for months.

An international team of scientists reports in the Nature journal Communications Earth and Environment that they tracked the cloud to an altitude of 35 kilometres (21 miles).

They measured it as 1,000 kms (625 miles) across. They followed it around the planet for 66,000 kms (41,010 miles). And they confirm that it remained intact for three months.

This high-flying pollution wasn’t the first such instance: just three times the size of any observed predecessor. Until now the record was held by plumes soaring from forest fires in western Canada in 2017.

Growing intensity

“When I saw the satellite measurement of the smoke plume at 35 kms, it was jaw-dropping. I never would have expected that”, said Adam Bourassa of the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, one of the researchers.

“We’re seeing records broken in terms of the impact on the atmosphere from these fires. Knowing that they’re likely to strike more frequently and with more intensity due to climate change, we could end up with a pretty dramatically changed atmosphere.”

A blaze that can make a new cloud 35 kms above its surface is an indicator both of the potential devastation of climate change driven by profligate human use of fossil fuels and of the intricate workings of the biosphere and atmosphere.

After months of desperate drought in 2019, eastern Australia effectively caught fire. Around 110,000 sq kms of bush, forest and grassland went up in smoke: with them went thousands of homes and millions of wild and domestic animals. Altogether 33 people died.

“We’re seeing records broken in terms of the impact on the atmosphere from these fires … we could end up with a pretty dramatically changed atmosphere”

So huge and sustained were the fires, and so dense the smoke, that the fires began to generate their own thunderstorms, known as pyrocumulonimbus, to create powerful updrafts to carry the aerosols and soot far above the flight paths of the highest jet airliners.

Researchers from France, the UK and Canada used sensitive satellite readings to track the sustained smoke signal from a part-incinerated island: at altitude, it was still dense enough to absorb, scatter and weaken the sunlight falling on the Earth below.

“What was also really amazing was that as the smoke sits in the atmosphere, it starts to absorb sunlight and so it starts to heat up,” Professor Bourassa said.

“And then, because it’s getting hotter, it starts to rise in a swirling vortex bubble, and it just rose higher and higher through the atmosphere.” − Climate News Network

Western US and Southeast Asia face rising dust risk

October 26th, 2020, by Tim Radford

The 1930s Midwest Dust Bowl: An abandoned farm in Texas. 

Image: By Dorothea Lange, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

It obscures the skies and darkens the snows. Wind-borne dust risk is increasingly ominous in a warming world.

LONDON, 26 October, 2020 − Half a planet apart, one low-lying and the other on the roof of the world, two huge regions confront an increasing dust risk − a menace to jobs, to food and to lives.

The Great Plains of North America are getting dustier every year because more soil is now being exposed to erosion. And high in the Himalayas on the continent of Asia, the peaks too are becoming dustier, in ways that threaten to increase the melting of high-altitude snows.

Both findings are in essence bad news. In the western US, higher levels of wind erosion as a consequence of changing farm practices combined with ever-greater probabilities of drought mean ever-higher probabilities of a return of the Dust Bowl that devastated the US Midwest 90 years ago.

And 700 million people in Southeast Asia, China and India depend on the slow melting of the Himalayan glaciers to irrigate their crops in the hot dry season: earlier melting threatens not just livelihoods but lives.

Taken for farming

In the 1930s, the Great Plains region was hit by drought that extended from Canada to Mexico. By then, vast tracts of prairie had been converted from wild grassland to ploughed field.

“The result was massive dust storms we associate with the Dust Bowl. These dust storms removed nutrients from the soil, making it difficult for crops to grow and more likely for wind erosion to occur,” said Andrew Lambert of the University of Utah.

He and colleagues from Colorado report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that they measured atmospheric dust levels by studying evidence from both space and from the ground, and collected data from 1988 to 2018.

They found that atmospheric dust over the Great Plains was increasing at 5% a year. That would mean a doubling in just two decades.

“The massive dust storms we associate with the Dust Bowl removed nutrients from the soil, making it difficult for crops to grow and more likely for wind erosion to occur”

They also found that levels of dust matched the planting and harvest months of soybean in the north, and corn in the southern states. How the land was farmed could be connected directly to the haze in the air.

Dust plays a powerful role in planetary management: researchers established years ago that the rich biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest was nourished and supplemented almost annually by deposits of fertile dust blown across the Atlantic from the African Sahara. And dust falling into the ocean on the journey also helped nourish marine life far below the surface of the Atlantic.

Now it seems that wind-blown dust from two continents also settles on the biggest and highest tracts of the Himalayas, to darken the snow, change its reflectivity and absorb the sun’s warmth.

Scientists from the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory report in Nature Climate Change that they used detailed satellite imagery of the Himalayas to measure aerosols, elevation and snow surfaces to identify dust and other pollutants.

Constant release

They found that, at up to 4500 metres altitude, black carbon or soot played an important role in influencing the melt timetable of the high snows. Above that altitude, dust was the most important factor: dust from the Thar desert in India, from Saudi Arabia and even from the African Sahara.

Although this was part of a natural cycle, humankind may be accelerating the traffic and adding to the dust risk: ever-higher planetary temperatures have begun to affect atmospheric circulation. And as humans turn natural ecosystems into farmland, they release even more dust.

“The snow in the western Himalayas is receding rapidly. We need to understand why this is happening and we need to understand the implications,” said Chandan Sarangi, then at Pacific Northwest but now at the Madras Institute of Technology in Chennai, and one of the authors.

“We’ve shown that dust can be a big contributor to the accelerated snowmelt. Hundreds of millions of people in the region rely on snow for their drinking water − we need to consider factors like dust seriously to understand what’s happening.” − Climate News Network

Poor air inflicts billions of premature deaths in Asia

October 22nd, 2020, by Nivedita Khandekar

Traffic jam in Beijing: But China has made big strides towards air quality improvement. 

Image: By public domain, via Wikipedia Commons

Air pollution by tiny particles is among the world’s worst health risks. In South Asia, poor air is as bad as it gets.

NEW DELHI, 22 October, 2020 − Poor air costs lives, but finding out just how many of them will come as a shock to many residents of South Asia’s big cities.

In India’s capital, New Delhi, just going outside and breathing the air can shorten your life by more than nine years, according to a new report into the region’s air quality that measures the effects of pollution on life expectancy.

For millions of people across across north-west India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, it will be bad news − despite the Covid crisis − because of the current surge in air pollution in the region.

But none of the people of four countries, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, will be happy with the prediction that their lives will be shortened unless their governments take air pollution seriously.

New Delhi is the worst single example in the four, but few of their citizens − a quarter of the world’s population − will escape.

Bangladesh worst hit

Averaged across the whole population, the people of Bangladesh suffer most from air pollution in any country, with their average life span cut short by 6.2 years.

An air quality index (AQI) provides daily air quality assessments, but not the actual health risk. An air quality life index (AQLI) goes further: it converts particulate air pollution into perhaps the most important air pollution metric that exists: its impact on life expectancy.

The report is the work of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), which has recently updated its AQLI, based on research by its director Michael Greenstone that quantified the causal relationship between human exposure to air pollution and reduced life expectancy.

While the report makes grim reading for nations south of the Himalayas, it does offer some hope, saying that the people of China can see marked improvements since their government began clamping down on polluting industries in 2013.

The report uses two measures to calculate lower expectations of life expectancy: the more stringent World Heath Organisation guidelines (WHO) and the limits imposed by the governments concerned.

“The threat of coronavirus is grave and deserves every bit of the attention it is receiving [but] embracing the seriousness of air pollution with a similar vigour would allow billions of people around the world to lead longer and healthier lives”

It says air pollution shortens Indian average life expectancy by 5.2 years, relative to what it would be if the WHO guidelines were met, but by 2.3 years relative to the rate if pollution were reduced to meet the country’s own national standard.

Some areas of India fare much worse than the average, with air pollution shortening lives by 9.4 years in Delhi and 8.6 years in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, the report’s India fact sheet 2020 says.

Similarly, the Pakistan sheet says the average Pakistani’s life expectancy has been shortened by 2.7 years, while air pollution cuts lives by more than 4 years in the most polluted areas.

Naming Bangladesh as the world’s most polluted country, EPIC’s report says air pollution shortens the average citizen’s life expectancy by 6.2 years, compared to what it would be if the WHO guidelines were met.

Again, some areas suffer far more, with lives cut by about 7 years in the most polluted district. In every one of the country’s 64 districts, particulate pollution levels are at least four times the WHO guidelines.

Possible underestimate

Surprisingly Nepal, which unlike its southern neighbours is not normally associated with air pollution, also had serious problems with its crowded and polluted cities. As a result, life expectancy there is cut by 4.7 years across the whole population.

“Though the threat of coronavirus is grave and deserves every bit of the attention it is receiving − perhaps more in some places − embracing the seriousness of air pollution with a similar vigour would allow billions of people around the world to lead longer and healthier lives,” says Professor Greenstone.

The science of air pollution, and the impact of poor air on the human body, is evolving rapidly, and some Asian scientists have expressed reservations about the accuracy of some of the calculations. However, none of them disputes the fact that millions are dying early because of the pollution.

The report concentrates on the effect of the smaller particulates that are known to do the most damage to lungs, and to enter the bloodstream, and it may in fact be underestimating the overall effects of poor air quality. − Climate News Network

* * * * * *

Nivedita Khandekar is an independent journalist based in New Delhi, covering development and the environment: nivedita_him@rediffmail.com and on twitter at @nivedita_Him

More avoidable pandemics await a heedless world

November 11th, 2020, by Tim Radford

On sale in China: Bushmeat, an open road to microbial transfer between species. 

Image: By Simon Law, via Wikimedia Commons

There will be more avoidable pandemics, more devastating and lethal, as humans intrude further upon the planet’s forests.

LONDON, 11 November, 2020 − Once again, naturalists have warned that the invasion of wilderness can seriously damage human health: avoidable pandemics − Covid-19 is an instance of a disease transferred from wild mammals to humans − threaten to arrive more often, spread more rapidly, do more damage to the global economy, and kill more people.

That’s because the odds on even more fearful infections remain very high: the world’s wild mammals could between them be hosts to 1.7 million viruses that have yet to be identified and named. If only a third of them them could infect humans, that’s 540,000 new diseases waiting to happen.

The number could be higher: perhaps 850,000 potential infections lie so far undisturbed, waiting to happen.

A new report by a team of 22 global experts warns that Covid-19 is at least the sixth global health pandemic since the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918: all had their origins in microbes carried by animals, and all were awakened and spread by human interaction with the wilderness.

By July 2020, the coronavirus linked to a market in wild animals in Wuhan in China had spread around the planet at a cost of between US$8 trillion and $16tn. The world has already seen the Ebola virus devastating West African communities, the HIV/Aids epidemic, Zika, and many others claiming lives in the last century.

Wilderness no more

The arrival of new zoonotic diseases − infections caught from other creatures − has been counted at roughly two a year since 1918. The number could increase to as many as five a year. And most of them will be linked to increasing human impact upon what had once been largely undisturbed wilderness.

“There is no great mystery about the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic − or of any modern pandemic”, said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and chair of a workshop of the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES for short) that assembled the research.

“The same human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive pandemic risk through their impacts on our environment. Changes in the way we use land; the expansion and intensification of agriculture; and unsustainable trade, production and consumption disrupt nature and increase contact between wildlife, livestock, pathogens and people. This is the path to pandemics.”

All living things are host to viruses and other microbes: in most cases host and parasite adapt to live peaceably with each other. The danger comes when a microbe transfers to a new host that is entirely unprepared for the invader.

“We still rely on attempts to contain and control diseases after they emerge. We can escape the era of pandemics, but this requires a greater focus on prevention”

What became known as the human immuno-deficiency virus HIV-1 is believed to have emerged first in West or Central Africa from the remains of chimpanzees hunted and sold for bushmeat. It spread around the planet within a decade, to claim millions of lives as the disease AIDS. Ebola infects both primates and humans: in an outbreak among humans, it has been known to kill 90% of all infected people.

Researchers have consistently linked epidemic and pandemic outbreaks to climate change, to the destruction and degradation of the wilderness, and to the traffic in wild creatures as objects of value or commerce.

And all are consequences ultimately of exponential growth in human numbers in the last century, a growth that puts ever greater pressure on what had once been largely undisturbed tropical forest, grassland and wetland.

Around a quarter of all wild terrestrial vertebrate species are traded globally. International, legal wildlife trade has increased fivefold in revenue in the last 14 years. It is now worth an estimated $107bn.

The illegal traffic in wildlife could be worth anywhere between $7bn and $23bn annually. The US imports around 10 to 20 million wild animals a year. In China in 2016, what is now called wildlife farming employed 14 million people and generated $77bn in revenue.

Negligible cost

Researchers have already argued that intrusion into what should be protected ecosystems that are home to the shrinking pool of wild birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians − a million species could be nearing global extinction − not only threatens the wellbeing of the planet; it also generates an increasing health hazard.

The latest study lists a range of policy options to reduce the risk of assault by new plagues. These rest upon greater awareness of, and respect for, the natural capital of the wilderness. Conservation of this kind costs money, but at least 100 times less than the toll of successive pandemics likely without a change in human attitudes.

“We have increasing ability to prevent pandemics, but the way we are tackling them right now largely ignores that ability,” Dr Daszak said. “Our approach has effectively stagnated − we still rely on attempts to contain and control diseases after they emerge, through vaccines and therapeutics.

“We can escape the era of pandemics, but this requires a greater focus on prevention in addition to reaction.” − Climate News Network

 Carbon speeds crop growth but often for little gain

November 10th, 2020, by Paul Brown

The world depends on rice, one crop less likely to thrive on increased carbon.

 Image: By Wibi Wibisono on Unsplash

More carbon dioxide speeds up crop growth with some key food harvests, but extra heat can hit the yield.

LONDON, 10 November, 2020 − Thirty years of experiments in testing crop growth, and notably the effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) on some human staples like rice, wheat and soya, have found that − given perfect growing conditions − they would increase yields by 18%.

But sadly, in “real world” conditions, any gains from carbon fertilisation are lost − because of the stress caused to crops by the 2°C temperature rise that the gas causes in the atmosphere. Even worse, the fact that crops grow faster does not mean that their nutritional value is greater – many showed lower mineral nutrients and protein content.

The work, 30 years of “free air carbon dioxide enrichment” (FACE), carried out by 14 long-term research facilities in five continents, is a blow to the hope that in a world with more atmospheric CO2 more people could be fed with less land under cultivation. Earlier results had held out the hope that this “fertiliser effect” would feed more people.

While commercial growers of plants like tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers have used increased CO2 to boost production in controlled conditions in greenhouses, it does not work so well in open fields where temperature and moisture content are affected by climate change.

“When you have other stresses, you don’t always get a benefit of elevated CO2. The last 15 years have taught us to account more for the complex interactions from other factors”

Some crops do get a boost from more carbon in the atmosphere because it makes photosynthesis more efficient, but this is only if nutrients and water are available at optimum levels. This group includes soybean, cassava and rice, all vital in feeding some of the hungriest people in the world.

The author of the study, Stephen Long from the University of Illinois,  said that while it seemed reasonable to assume “a bounty as CO2 rises” this was not the case, because “CO2 is the primary cause of change in the global climate system. The anticipated 2°C rise in temperature, caused primarily by this increase in CO2, could halve yields of some of our major crops, wiping out any gain from CO2.”

His co-author Lisa Ainsworth, a research plant physiologist with the US Department of Agriculture, said: “It’s quite shocking to go back and look at just how much CO2 concentrations have increased over the lifetime of these experiments.

“We are reaching the concentrations of some of the first CO2 treatments 30 years back. The idea that we can check the results of some of the first FACE experiments in the current atmosphere is disconcerting.

Need for nitrogen

“Lots of people have presumed that rising CO2 is largely a good thing for crops, assuming more CO2 will make the world’s forests greener and increase crop yields,” Ainsworth said.

“The more recent studies challenge that assumption a bit. We’re finding that when you have other stresses, you don’t always get a benefit of elevated CO2. The last 15 years have taught us to account more for the complex interactions from other factors like drought, temperature, nutrients and pests.”

The poor quality of some of the grain, with less mineral and protein content, is also a blow to add to the crop growth doubts. The potential increased yield is also much smaller under conditions where there is low nitrogen fertiliser, typical of the world’s poorest countries.

However, the researchers are not all gloomy. Genetic variations in crops show that some strains can still benefit despite increased temperatures. If new crop cultivars are developed, then the future could be brighter, but work needs to start now, the scientists say. − Climate News Network