The World Health Organization (WHO) tightened its air-quality guidelines for the first time since 2005, hoping to spur countries toward clean energy and prevent deaths and illness caused by air pollution.
The new recommendations 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 7 million people prematurely each year. Even at very low levels, research has shown "air pollution affects all parts of the body, from the brain to a growing baby in a mother's womb," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference.
The United Nations body said it hopes the revisions encourage their 194 member countries toward 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 worried 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% 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 those 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 in 2020, even with the industry and transportation shutdowns because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Experts said that 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 two go hand in hand," said Kurt Straif, a former scientist with the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer, who is a visiting professor and codirector of the Global Observatory on Pollution at Boston College. "While implementation is extremely challenging, it is also a once-in-a-generation opportunity in the post-COVID recovery."