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Story highlights
- Residential energy use and agricultural emissions lead causes of air pollution deaths
- Highest death rates found in Southeast Asia
- By 2050, there could be 6.6 million premature deaths every year worldwide, study says
(CNN)The air we breathe outdoors could be harming more people than ever, a new study suggests.
Globally, more than 3 million people die prematurely each year from prolonged exposure to air pollution, according to the World Health Organization. By 2050, it could be 6.6 million premature deaths every year worldwide, a new study predicts.
Chronic exposure to air pollution particles contributes to the risk of developing cardiovascular and respiratory diseases as well as lung cancer, WHO said.
"The total number of deaths due to HIV and malaria is 2.8 million per year," said Jos Lelieveld, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and lead author of the study. "That's half a million less than the number of people who die from air pollution globally."
Residential energy emissions -- from fuels used for cooking and heating, especially in India and China -- had the largest impact on deaths worldwide.
"When most people think of outdoor air pollution, they tend to think of traffic and industry having the largest impact on global premature mortality, not residential energy emissions and agriculture," Lelieveld said.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, noted that the highest number of deaths per capita were in the Western Pacific region, followed by the eastern Mediterranean and Southeast Asia.
Air pollution deaths in different areas
The study examined outdoor emission sources in urban and rural environments: residential and commercial energy use, agriculture, power generation, industry, biomass burning, natural causes and land traffic.
Coupling air pollution data with country-specific population and health statistics from WHO, researchers were able to measure the effect different sources of outdoor air pollution had on premature deaths.
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Coping with smog – A sense of humor helps. Beijingers coined the wry phrase '#APEC blue' after authorities used extreme measures to control pollution during November's APEC summit. The smog quickly returned after the summit finished and world leaders had departed. With snow forecast this week in the capital, locals have coined a new weather word: snoggy.
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Mask the problem – Face masks that protect against the smog are de rigueur for both a morning stroll .....
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Sport in the smog – ....and sporting events like the recent Beijing marathon.
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Smog fashion – Fashion designers are even incorporating face masks into designs and runway shows.
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Empty playgrounds – Schools keep students indoors during heavy smog.
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Play dome – The International School of Beijing has erected a huge dome to allow kids space to roam and breathe.
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Play dome – Otherwise they would have little opportunity for physical exercise in clean air.
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'Invisible' mask – The pollution problem is also driving innovation. Infipure's "nose mask" claims to cut 99% of PM 2.5 particles without the bulkiness of a surgical face mask. The disposable filters, made from non-toxic, latex-free materials, are inserted into your nostrils and aim to be undetectable.
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Plant backpack – Artists have come up with their own take on the problem. Chiu Chih has designed a a bold, abstract take on an oxygen tank -- a potted plant inside a clear backpack hooked up to two tubes to funnel fresh air into a face mask.
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Breathing bike – British artist Matt Hope attached a small generator to a bike's back wheel and as he pedals, electricity is produced to power his homemade filtration system. He says it's "an ironic commentary about living in China."
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DIY air purifier – Thomas Talhelm started worrying about the air inside his Beijing home in 2013 but couldn't afford the luxury of an expensive air purifier. He created an air purifier consisting of a basic household fan with a HEPA filter attached to it.
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What the Great Wall should look like everyday – But it's not always gloomy. Clear days provoke a frenzy of photo taking in and around the Chinese capital. These days though are not common enough.
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Low-quality fuels used for cooking, heating and waste disposal led to a high number of premature deaths in populous parts of Asia, including China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Nepal.
Agricultural emissions were the leading cause of premature air pollution deaths in the Eastern United States, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Korea and Japan, followed by traffic and power generation emissions, the study found. Ammonia released from fertilizers and domesticated animals mixes with other sources of air pollution, such as traffic emissions, and can have a big impact on air quality, researchers found.
In the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, natural sources of air pollution, such as desert storm dust, were the dominant contributor to premature mortality, according to the study.
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A haze has periodically wafted over Southeast Asia for 20 years. It is especially bad in the Asia-Pacific region, which has a population of over 4.2 billion and high population density. Pictured, smog hovers above the Kuala Lumpur skyline in June 2013.
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Smoke billowing from fires in areas surrounded by plantations in Riau province, on Indonesia's Sumatra island, about 173 miles west of Singapore on June 17 2013. On June 20, Singapore demanded "definitive" action by Indonesia on forest fires raging in Sumatra as the nations prepared for emergency talks to ease the severe smog enveloping Singapore.
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A woman walks through haze as a forest fire burns bushes and fields, June 27, 2013 in Riau province, Indonesia. The fires on Sumatra caused record smog levels in Malaysia and Singapore. Sumatra was forced to step up efforts to fight the fires to relieve conditions, with eight farmers arrested for starting the fires.
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Burned trees and clearing in protected peatland in Riau province, June 29 2013. Environmentalists say that illegal slash and burn method is a widespread method of clearing land.
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Indonesian motorists travel under a blanket of haze in Dumai town, Riau province, March 3, 2014.
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March 1 2014, In Medan, Indonesia, construction workers toil in the setting sun as smoke from fires in Riau province covers the region. The province was at the heart of a Southeast Asian smog crisis in 2013 and declared a state of emergency in February 2014 after being blanketed in a thick haze from forest fires.
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Singapore's skyscrapers enveloped in smog, 16 October 2006, from forests fire in Indonesia. The annual recurrence of carbon-rich haze caused by fires in Indonesia's vast tropical peatlands may help fuel global warming if left unchecked, experts have warned.
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A man practices Tai Chi in Shanghai as heavy smog engulfs the city on November 7, 2013. In 2010, 40% of the world's premature deaths caused by air pollution were in China, according to a survey published in the Lancet.
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To get a global view of the problem, researchers had to develop atmospheric-chemistry models that collected both ground and satellite measurements. They used those to calculate the concentrations of fine particle matter in air pollution over time and from different emissions sources around the world.
"Testing for the effects of air pollution emissions in different parts of the world was a very challenging task," Lelieveld said, "especially in many developing countries, where air quality monitoring systems are minimal."
Country-specific changes to affect health
Examining the specific emission source of the pollutants was an important aspect of this study, researchers said. Lelieveld and his colleagues believe that air pollution is composed of particles with different toxicity levels. Researchers said legislators and policy makers need to know what air pollution sources trouble their ar