Air pollution
An Assessment Paper on air pollution was written by Guy Hutton and released as a chapter in How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World?
Facts and figures about air pollution
The biggest environmental problem in the world is, perhaps surprisingly, air pollution. Perhaps even more surprisingly, it has been declining for past 110 years. This is because most air pollution deaths are caused by indoor pollution from cooking and heating with dirty fuels. Over the 20th century, 260 million died from indoor air pollution in the Third World – about twice the toll in all the century’s wars. This is more than 4 times more than died from outdoor air pollution. As poverty has receded and clean fuels gotten cheaper, the risk has fallen eight-fold and will decline another 70% until 2050.