Almost one in seven children worldwide live
in areas with high levels of outdoor air pollution, mostly in South Asia, and
their growing bodies are most vulnerable to damage, the U.N. children's agency
UNICEF said on October 31st. UNICEF called on almost 200 governments, which
will meet in Morocco from Nov. 7-18 for talks on global warming, to restrict
use of fossil fuels to give twin benefits of improved health and slower climate
change. About 300 million children, or almost one in seven worldwide, lived in
areas where outdoor pollution was highest, defined by UNICEF as at least six
times international guidelines set by the World Health Organization (WHO), it
said. Of the total, 220 million lived in South Asia. It identified the regions
with satellite imagery developed by NASA. UNICEF executive director Anthony
Lake said air pollution was a "major contributing factor in the deaths of
around 600,000 children under five every year", causing illnesses such as
pneumonia. "Pollutants don't only harm children's developing lungs - they
can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and permanently damage their
developing brains - and, thus, their futures," he said in a statement. "Air
pollution affects poor children the most," Nicholas Rees, a UNICEF
specialist on climate and economic analysis who wrote the report, told Reuters.
Worldwide, the WHO estimates that outdoor air pollution killed 3.7 million
people in 2012, including 127,000 children aged under five. Factories, power
plants and vehicles using fossil fuels, dust and burning of waste were among
sources. Indoor air pollution, often caused by coal- or wood-burning cooking
stoves used in homes in developing nations, killed even more people, 4.3
million, of whom 531,000 were aged under five, it said. UNICEF called on the
U.N.-led meeting in Morocco to hasten a shift from fossil fuels to cleaner
energies such as wind or solar power, to improve children's access to health
care, limit children's exposure to pollution and to step up monitoring of the
air.
One in seven children suffer high air pollution: UNICEF
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