November 8, 1997

Climate Protection Saves Lives Now

D iplomats who will be negotiating in Kyoto, Japan, next month for an aggressive new treaty to curb emissions of greenhouse gases received an unanticipated bargaining chip this week. An international analysis concludes that such climate protection policies could save hundreds of thousands of lives annually by 2020.

This preliminary study "shows that if sensible policies are taken on greenhouse gases, they will have benefits far beyond climate change prevention," says epidemiologist Tord Kjellstrom, director of the Office of Global and Integrated Environmental Health of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva and an organizer of the team that conducted the analysis. Moreover, notes coauthor Devra Lee Davis of the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., "these health benefits show up immediately -- the year the policies are put in place."

Any controls that limit fossil fuel combustion, the major source of carbon dioxide -- and the leading agent of global warming -- also limit emissions of the traditional combustion pollutants, such as microscopic particles. When inhaled, these dustlike particulates can aggravate respiratory and heart diseases. Indeed, as concentrations of airborne particulates rise, so do death rates from these diseases (SN: 7/1/95, p. 5).

Last year, WHO issued a 400-page report on projected health impacts of climate change. It focused on problems associated with heat (SN: 4/6/96, p. 218) and only briefly acknowledged likely effects of particulates on health, Kjellstrom notes.

To investigate this issue, he and Davis teamed up with colleagues from a host of institutions, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. Their Working Group on Public Health and Fossil-Fuel Combustion analyzed how fossil fuel use would drop if the European Union's proposed restrictions take effect (SN: 11/1/97, p. 277). In that proposal, industrial nations would cut greenhouse gas releases by 2010 to a level 15 percent below their 1990 emissions. The working group also assumed developing nations would slow their increase in greenhouse emissions to peak by 2010 at about 10 percent below where they would be if current trends continue.

The scientists plugged these estimates into computer programs that model how particulate concentrations change regionally and then tallied death rates, based on associations seen in several recent health studies.

In the Nov. 8 Lancet, the working group predicts that "700,000 avoidable deaths will occur annually" from particulate exposures by 2020 "under the business-as-usual forecasts, when compared with the climate-policy scenario." The cumulative impact between 2000 and 2020 of not adopting sharp climate protection policies could be some 8 million premature deaths, most of them in developing countries, they say.

What makes this analysis special is its scope, says Richard Wilson, a physicist at Harvard University and adviser to the working group. "It's the first time that anybody has looked at this [particulates and health] issue globally."

Economist Dallas Burtraw of the Washington, D.C.­based Resources for the Future has estimated the economic value of such health benefits for the United States. He finds that they could offset about 30 percent of the costs associated with new climate protection policies -- and an even greater proportion of the costs in developing countries.

C. Arden Pope III of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who has conducted many of the particulates and health studies upon which the Lancet analysis is based, hopes that people will not place too much weight on its estimates of lives that can be saved by climate policies. Those numbers are still preliminary and rest on substantial uncertainties.

"The heart of that paper is the framework it offers for understanding how important a public health issue the reduction of combustion[-generated] particulates is," he says.

References:

Davis, D.L., et al. 1997. Short-term improvements in public health from global-climate policies on fossil-fuel combustion: An interim report. Lancet 350(Nov. 8):1341.

Burnett, R.T., et al. 1997. The role of particle size and chemistry in the association between summertime ambient air pollution and hospitalization for cardiorespiratory diseases. Environmental Health Perspectives 105(June):614.

Burtraw, D., and M. Toman. 1997. Benefits of reduced air pollutants in the U.S. from greenhouse gas mitigation policies. Resources For the Future Discussion Paper 98-01. Washington, D.C. Available at http://www.rff.org/DPAPERS/dps98.htm.

Health Effects Institute. 1997. Particulate air pollution and daily mortality: Analyses of the effects of weather and multiple air pollutants. Phase 1.B Report of the Particle Epidemiology Project March. Cambridge, Mass.

Monastersky, R. 1997. Beyond hot air. Science News 151(May 24):320.

Pope III, C.A., et al. 1995. Particulate air pollution as a predictor of mortality in a prospective study of U.S. adults. American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 151:669.

Raber, L.R. 1997. Clean air: Dollars versus lives. Chemical & Engineering News 75(Feb. 3):28.

Raloff, J. 1995. Heart-y risks from breathing fine dust. Science News 148(July 1):5.

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Wilson, R., and J. Spengler. 1996. Particles in Our Air. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger.

Woodruff, T.J., J. Grillo, and K.C. Schoendorf. 1997. The relationship between selected causes of postneonatal infant mortality and particulate air pollution in the United States. Environmental Health Perspectives 105(June):608.

Yuhnke, R. 1997. Particles of concern. Environmental Forum 14(March-April):24.

Dallas Burtraw
Resources for the Future
1616 P Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
E-mail: burtraw@rff.org

Devra Lee Davis
World Resources Institute
1709 New York Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20006

Tord Kjellstrom
Office of Global and Integrated Environmental Health
World Health Organization
1211 Geneva
Switzerland

C. Arden Pope III
142 FOB
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602

Richard Wilson
Department of Physics
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138

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