WHO Tackles the Health Impacts of Air Pollution
By Kesiah Clement
In 2015, prior to the Paris Climate Conference, the World Health Organization (WHO) called climate change the "greatest threat to global health in the 21st century.” As our world becomes warmer and more populated, and as we continue to produce dirty emissions, the air we breathe is growing horrifically polluted. Nine out of ten people now breathe polluted air, killing around 7 million people every year. The health effects of air pollution are serious—one third of the deaths from stroke, lung cancer, and heart disease are due to air pollution. Yet, in 2015, even though WHO recognized the potential impacts of air pollution on human health, they had not taken any action to address it.
However, this past month, WHO conducted its first WHO Global Conference on Air Pollution in Geneva, Switzerland, from October 30 to November 1. The conference aimed to raise awareness of air pollution as a public health issue, share information on the health risks of air pollution, and provide potential solutions. The convention displayed some of WHO’s recent work on air pollution, including the findings from its report on Global Platform on Air Quality and Health. The conference was held in response to a resolution of the Sixty-Eighth World Health Assembly in 2015, in which ministers of health from different countries asked for a significant scaling-up of the response by health sectors to prevent air pollution diseases and their respective costs to society. There was participation from and collaboration with national and city governments, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, philanthropy organizations, and academics. The conference was organized in collaboration with UN Environment, the World Meteorological Organization, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants, the UN Economic Commission for Europe, the World Bank, and the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
During the conference, WHO also unveiled a new report that addressed the impact of air pollution on child health, revealing that air pollution was linked to the deaths of around 543,000 children under 5 years old in 2016. Other notable takeaways from the conference resulted in the Geneva Action Agenda to Combat Air Pollution, which identifies actions necessary to reach an aspirational goal of reducing the number of deaths from air pollution by two thirds by 2030. Efforts to combat air pollution will also contribute to achieving several of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Often times, global health problems are tackled by global health experts. Conferences which utilize multisector and intergovernmental collaboration, like the WHO Global Conference on Air Pollution, are important to the future growth of global health governance. This conference represents a hopeful first step of many that aims to solve pervasive global health problems from a more interdisciplinary lens.
Kesiah Clement (SFS’19) is an undergraduate studying science, technology, and international affairs and a student fellow with the Global Health Initiative.