"A ‘New Era of Air Pollution’ in the Tropics Could Have a Huge Toll"

"Increasingly bad air in big cities is expected to kill hundreds of thousands in coming years if stronger controls are not put in place."

"Urban air pollution in the tropics is rapidly increasing and will lead to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths if stronger regulations are not put in place, according to a new study.

Some 180,000 premature deaths in large tropical cities in 2018 alone were attributable to increased exposure to pollutants since 2005, according to researchers at University College London. That number, they noted, is made all the more alarming by the fact that nearly three-quarters of megacities, those with 10 million or more residents, are expected to be in the tropics by the end of the 21st century.

In many megacities, pollutants increased between 8 and 14 percent year to year, which is up to three times as high as national or regional rates of increase. And the vast majority appeared to come from industrial and residential sources, not from agricultural practices like biomass burning that have historically driven air pollution in tropical regions."

Maggie Astor reports for the New York Times April 8, 2022.

Source: NYTimes, 04/11/2022