Around 1.05 million global deaths could be avoided in 2017 by eliminating fossil-fuel combustion, with coal contributing to more than half of the attributable deaths, showed a recent study published in the journal Nature Communications.
With 58% of the total global ambient PM2.5 mortality burden, China and India together accounted for the largest number of attributable deaths. The study was done by an interdisciplinary group of researchers, who comprehensively examined the sources and health effects of air pollution not just on a global scale, but also individually for more than 200 countries and sub-national regions.
Other dominant sources included residential (0.74 million deaths; 19.2% of PM2.5 burden), industrial (0.45 million deaths; 11.7% PM2.5 burden), and energy (0.39 million deaths; 10.2% of PM2.5 burden) sectors.
As per the study, in 2017, the global PM2.5 average concentration was 41.7 μg/m3, with 91% of the world’s population experiencing annual average concentrations higher than the World Health Organization (WHO) annual average guideline of 10 μg/m3. More than 65% of the sub-national regions experienced higher PM2.5 concentrations than their national averages.
In some extreme cases in regions around Kanpur and Singrauli, the annual average PM2.5 concentrations exceeded 150 μg/m3, almost four times the safety limit prescribed by the Central Pollution Control Board and 15 times higher than the WHO guideline.
For the top nine countries that had the highest numbers of attributable deaths, coal was the largest contributing fuel in China, accounting for 22.7% or 315,000 deaths.
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