Delays in clearing the EU’s air will cause thousands of extra early deaths, health experts say

Proposed delays in EU air pollution limits will lead to hundreds of thousands more people dying prematurely and will “widen the inequality gap between Eastern and Western Europe,” a group of public health experts has warned as EU negotiators finalize key rules issued to clear the air.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has set guidelines for how many small particles and how much toxic gas can pollute the air, but stressed that no level of pollution is safe to breathe. Doctors write in the International Journal of Public Health wants the limits to be met by the end of this decade, but the European Parliament wants to wait until 2035, the European Commission wants to set weaker limits for 2030 without setting a date to align with the WHO, and the EU Council wants to give poorer countries the opportunity to wait until 2040.

“Every year of delay in reaching the limit values ​​directly translates into more deaths and diseases,” says Barbara Hoffman, chair of the advocacy council of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) and head of environmental epidemiology at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf .

Hoffman and colleagues from several public health institutes found that 330,000 extra people would die prematurely if EU member states with particulate matter levels above 10 micrograms per cubic meter delayed reducing their pollution to that level by ten years between 2030 and 2040. The WHO limit is 5 micrograms per cubic meter. “These figures make it clear that allowing a delay will cause a substantial, unjust and unacceptable loss of life in Europe,” the scientists wrote.

Doctors call bad air an invisible killer. Every breath a person takes draws in pollutants small enough to seep from the lungs into the bloodstream. Once in the blood, they flow through the body and damage the organs.

The worst air in Europe is found in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in Italy, but a Guardian survey in September found that 98% of Europeans breathe air so polluted that it exceeds the WHO exceeds limits.

The EU Council has proposed that countries with a high share of low-income households and a GDP per person below the EU average should not meet the limits until 2040, as they have less money to invest in clean-up work. Many poorer European countries have polluted air because they burn power plants with more coal to make electricity, burn more wood and coal to heat homes, and because they have older cars and factories.

The scientists said that “using poverty as an excuse for inaction is exactly the opposite of what these countries need.”

It would be better for human health in these countries to enact laws and provide funding to accelerate “urgently needed” clean air policies, she added.

“We need fair and ambitious new EU air quality legislation that values ​​the health of all Europeans equally,” said Zorana Jovanovic Andersen, environmental epidemiologist at the University of Copenhagen and chair of the ERS Committee on Environment and Health. “Children and adults in Eastern European countries have been breathing the most polluted air in Europe for far too long – and suffering from related lung diseases.”

Bad air hurts economies because it means people take more sick days and need more hospital treatment. An impact assessment by the European Commission found that full compliance with WHO guidelines by 2030 would deliver the largest net economic benefit of the three scenarios it considered, with savings of €38 billion (£32 billion) per year.

The financial implications are relevant, says Margherita Tolotto of the European Environment Agency’s campaign group. “We must remember that the cost of inaction is much higher than the cost of taking action to reduce air pollution.”