WHO tightens air quality guidelines targeting pollutants

GENEVA • The World Health Organisation (WHO) has tightened its air quality guidelines for the first time since 2005, hoping to spur countries towards clean energy and prevent deaths and illness caused by air pollution.

The new recommendations on Wednesday targeting pollutants including particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, both of which are found in fossil fuel emissions, could save "millions of lives", it said.

Air pollution kills at least seven million people prematurely each year. WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference that even at very low levels, research has shown that "air pollution affects all parts of the body, from the brain to a growing baby in a mother's womb".

The United Nations body hopes the revisions encourage its 194 member countries to take actions that slash fossil fuel emissions, which are also driving climate change.

Globally, countries are under pressure to pledge bold emissions-cutting plans ahead of the UN climate conference in November in Glasgow, Scotland.

Scientists applauded the new guidelines, but raised concern that some countries would have trouble implementing them, given that much of the world was failing to meet the older, less stringent standards.

In 2019, a full 90 per cent of the global population was breathing air considered unhealthy by the 2005 guidelines, according to WHO data.

And some countries, such as India, still have national standards that are looser than the 2005 recommendations.

In the European Union, which has standards that are significantly higher than the WHO's older recommendations, some countries failed to keep average annual pollution levels within legal limits last year, even with the industry and transportation shutdowns amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Experts said efforts to curb pollution by reducing fossil fuel use would provide a double benefit, in both improving public health conditions and bringing down climate-warming emissions.

The new recommendations slash in half the WHO limits for a measure called PM2.5, which stands for particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers - or less than one-thirtieth the width of a human hair. That is small enough to travel deep into the lungs and even enter the blood stream.

According to the new limits, average annual PM2.5 concentrations should be no higher than five micrograms per cubic metre. The old recommendations set the average annual limit at 10.

In announcing the new guidelines, the WHO said that "almost 80 per cent of deaths related to PM2.5 could be avoided in the world if the current air pollution levels were reduced".

REUTERS