WHO
© Credits

Air quality

22 June 2023

Key facts 

  • Air pollution is the most significant environmental health risk in the WHO European Region. For 2019, 569 000 premature deaths can be attributed to ambient air pollution, and 154 000 deaths to household air pollution.
  • Of the 10 million disability-adjusted life years in 2019 attributed to ambient air pollution: 62% were due to ischemic heart disease; 18% were due to stroke; 7% were due to lower respiratory infections; 7% were due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; and 6% due to trachea, bronchus and lung cancer.
  • The International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified air pollution in general and particulate matter (PM) as a separate component of air pollution mixtures, as carcinogenic.
  • The mean annual concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in the WHO European Region was 14.9 µg/m3 in 2019. While this was significantly lower than the global average of 31.7 µg/m3, concentrations varied considerably across the Member States of the European Region; in the cities and settlements where measurements were available, the concentrations ranged from 5.5 to 53.7 µg/m3.
  • As estimated based on 2019 data, around 97% of the population in the European Region was exposed to PM2.5 concentrations above the WHO air quality guideline level.

 

 

Overview 

Over the years, ambient and household air pollution have gained growing prominence on the global health agenda. They represent the most significant environmental risk to health, alongside climate change, and are responsible every year for almost 7 million attributable deaths globally.

Improving air quality can deliver sustainable health benefits: reducing air pollution levels means reducing premature deaths and diseases due to stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and chronic and acute respiratory diseases, including asthma. Policies to reduce air pollution and mitigate climate change can produce several co-benefits for health, for example, in the transport sector, through reducing noise and injuries, and promoting physical activity.

 

WHO Response

  • WHO, through the European Centre for Environment and Health (WHO ECEH) works to bring the health argument to the forefront of intersectoral action and policy-making. To be effective, the implementation of air quality policies requires coherence at global, European, national and local levels and across most economic sectors; involvement of the health sector; and engagement of stakeholders.
  • Activities of WHO ECEH, which aim to achieve this objective, include normative work, development of methods and tools to quantify the health risks of air pollution, support for the implementation of international legal instruments, and extensive work with Member States, including through dedicated training workshops.
  • WHO ECEH chairs the Joint Task Force on the Health Aspects of Air Pollution under the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution, which gathers representatives of most of the 51 Parties to the Convention. Through regular meetings and implementation of its work plan, the Task Force and WHO have coordinated major international projects on air pollution and health and contributed to addressing the needs of the Convention and its Parties in science, capacity-building, communication and outreach.
  • To quantify the health impacts of air pollution and assist Member States in policy-making, WHO has developed several tools coupled with capacity-building activities to facilitate their uptake. The most important ones are AirQ+ and CLIMAQ-H.

    • AirQ+ performs calculations that allow quantification of the health impacts of exposure to air pollution, including estimates of the reduction in life expectancy for the most significant air pollutants. AirQ+ and its manuals are available in English, French, German and Russian.
    • CLIMAQ-H (formerly CaRBonH) assesses the links between air quality, health and economic gains from climate change mitigation. It can be used as a mechanism to determine the outcome of climate-driven policies and to promote decision-making in settings where there is limited data availability.

 

WHO ECEH has been coordinating the work on developing and updating the WHO global air quality guidelines, which are used as a reference tool to help decision-makers worldwide to set standards and goals for air quality management to protect population health. In addition to this normative work on air quality, it provides guidance and technical support on this matter directly to countries in the Region and through the publication of thematic reports, for example.