Air Pollution, Clean Energy and Climate Change. Anilla Cherian
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heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and cancer, and poses a considerable health threat to current and future generations; Concerned that half the deaths due to acute lower respiratory infections, including pneumonia in children aged less than five years, may be attributed to household air pollution, making it a leading risk factor for childhood mortality. Further concerned that air pollution, including fine particulate matter, is classified as a cause of lung cancer by WHO’s International Agency on Research for Cancer’ (emphasis added, World Health Assembly 2015, p. 20). By 2016, the WHO found 80% of outdoor air pollution–related premature deaths were associated with ischaemic heart disease and strokes, 14% with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and acute lower respiratory infections and 6% with lung cancer (WHO 2016a). A landmark 2018 report by the WHO highlighted that ‘climate change is the greatest health challenge of the 21st century and threatens all aspects of human society’, and expressly highlighted climate change as a ‘poverty multiplier’ (WHO 2018, p. 10).
Finding answers to the interlinked challenges of climatic impacts, energy poverty and toxic levels of energy related air pollution is now a global imperative from a public health perspective, and especially so within cities given the global trend towards urbanization. In the wake of the respiratory‐borne COVID‐19 pandemic that extracted a huge toll on those already suffering endemic disease burdens and unable to access health services, there is an urgency to understanding how exposure to air pollution and the lack of access to clean energy and health services intersect. This urgency for linked action on clean air and clean energy access is especially relevant to the future of the world’s most populous and polluted cities. In his 2019 speech to the C‐40 World Mayors Summit, the UN Secretary General highlighted the tremendous potential for cities as the loci for action on clean air, clean energy and climate resilience. He specifically referenced that cities consume more than two‐thirds of the world’s energy and account for more than 70% of global carbon dioxide emissions. His call for city‐based action on climate and clean air is exactly what is needed and yet is glaringly absent in long‐standing UN global goal silos on climate and clean energy: ‘Friends, cities are where the climate battle will largely be won or lost. With more than half the world’s population, cities are on the frontlines of sustainable … and inclusive development. With air pollution a grave and growing issue, people look to you to champion better urban air quality. With environmental degradation driving migration to urban areas, people rely on you to make your cities havens for diversity, social cohesion and job creation. You are the world’s first responders to the climate emergency’ (emphasis added, UN Press Release 2019).
It is indeed time to more effectively factor in the loci of cities as the frontline actors for climate and clean air responsive action, particularly in Asia and Africa. The global community has run out of excuses for delaying integrated action on polluting forms of energy and toxic levels of air pollution that worsens the lives of those least responsible for causing the problem of historical GHGs. Climate change has been explicitly and consistently highlighted as a ‘threat multiplier’ by numerous global entities, including the US Department of Defense which issued a publicly available 2014 warning: ‘Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty and conflict’ and ‘will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic diseases, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe’ (US Department of Defense 2014, foreword, WEF 2014). The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2019 Global Risks Report placed climate change as a primary risk with compounding/multiplier effects on human ill health, food insecurity, biodiversity loss bluntly highlighted the ‘climate catastrophe’ ahead: ‘Of all risks, it is in relation to the environment that the world is most clearly sleepwalking into catastrophe’ (2019a, p. 15). It is time to see that the propensity for extended sleepwalking into the entwined climate and air pollution crises is based on the illogic of having UN global silos that segregate increasing access to clean energy, curbing air pollution and addressing climate change.
By examining existing UN‐negotiated goal silos on climate change and sustainable energy, the aim is to evidence the need for integrated and localized action on the inherently linked climate and air pollution crises. Linkages between climate vulnerability, poverty and exposure to fossil fuel air pollution have been well documented by numerous UN and global entities, but persistent global goals/negotiations silos that segregate energy for sustainable development and poverty reduction goals from climate change goals have impeded the practice of integrated partnerships (Cherian 2015). Non‐nation‐state actors (NNSAs) such as local/municipal actors and the clean energy sector are principal responders to the integrated frontline on clean air, access to clean energy for all and climate change in urban areas that cope with toxic levels of air pollution. The aim of this chapter and this book is to focus on new frameworks for action by NNSAs on curbing short‐lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) which are associated with particulate matter (PM) pollution and offer public health and environmental benefits, but are not factored into the historic PA. To be clear from the outset, the need for linked action on clean air, clean energy access for the poor and climate change via NNSA‐driven partnerships and modalities cannot be viewed as a means to replace comprehensive global GHG reductions. New forms of city‐based measures should be seen as essential for addressing the more immediate imperatives of public health and reduced morbidity burdens associated with PM air pollution.
Figure 1.2 Global GHG emissions by gas.
Source: US EPA website (2021).
(Note: Details about the sources included in these estimates can be found in the Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Figure 1.2 (derived from IPCC’s AR5), the key GHGs emitted as a result of human activities at the global level are as follows:
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Fossil fuel use is the primary source of CO2. CO2 can also be emitted from direct human‐induced impacts on forestry and other land use, such as through deforestation, land clearing for agriculture and degradation of soils. Likewise, land can also remove CO2 from the atmosphere through reforestation, improvement of soils and other activities.
Methane (CH4) Agricultural activities, waste management, energy use and biomass burning all contribute to CH4 emissions.
Nitrous Oxide (N2O) Agricultural activities, such as fertilizer use, are the primary source of N2O emissions. Fossil fuel combustion also generates N2O.
Fluorinated gases (F‐gases) Industrial processes, refrigeration and the use of a variety of consumer products contribute to emissions of F‐gases, which include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6).
Mitigating GHGs should be viewed as critical to the future of human development. On 11 May 2019, sensors at the Mauna Loa Observatory (the premier atmospheric baseline station of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA]) confirmed, for the first time in recorded history, that monthly concentrations of CO2 breached the 400 parts per million (ppm) threshold (NOAA/ESRL website 2019). Two of the world’s leading scientific organizations, the Royal Society (UK) and the National Academy of Sciences (US) provided a sobering assessment that even if emissions of CO2 stopped altogether, ‘… surface temperatures would stay elevated for at least a thousand years, implying a long‐term commitment to a warmer planet due to past and current emissions… . The current CO2‐induced warming of Earth is therefore essentially irreversible on human timescales. The amount and rate of further warming will depend almost entirely on how much more CO2 humankind emits’ (emphasis added, 2020, p. 22). But, here