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Fossil fuel investment in Africa dwarfs clean air funding
By Patrick GALEY
Paris (AFP) Sept 6, 2022

Heatwaves and wildfires to worsen air pollution: UN
Geneva (AFP) Sept 7, 2022 - More frequent and intense heatwaves and wildfires driven by climate change are expected to worsen the quality of the air we breathe, harming human health and ecosystems, the UN warned Wednesday.

A new report from the UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) cautioned that the interaction between pollution and climate change would impact hundreds of millions of people over the coming century, and urged action to rein in the harm.

The WMO's annual Air Quality and Climate Bulletin examined the impacts of large wildfires across Siberia and western North America in 2021, finding that they produced widespread increases in health hazards, with concentrations in eastern Siberia reaching "levels not observed before".

Tiny particles with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometres (PM2.5) are considered particularly harmful since they can penetrate deep into the lungs or cardiovascular system.

"As the globe warms, wildfires and associated air pollution are expected to increase, even under a low emissions scenario," WMO chief Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

"In addition to human health impacts, this will also affect ecosystems as air pollutants settle from the atmosphere to Earth's surface."

- 'Foretaste of the future' -

At the global scale, there has been a reduction over the past two decades in the total burned area, as a result of decreasing numbers of fires in savannas and grasslands.

But WMO said that some regions like western North America, the Amazon and Australia were seeing far more fires.

Even beyond wildfires, a hotter climate can drive up pollution and worsen air quality.

Taalas pointed out that severe heatwaves in Europe and China this year, coupled with stable high atmospheric conditions, sunlight and low wind speeds, had been "conducive to high pollution levels," warning that "this is a foretaste of the future."

"We expect a further increase in the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves, which could lead to even worse air quality," he said.

This phenomenon is known as the "climate penalty", which refers to how climate change amplifies ground-level ozone production, which negatively impacts air quality.

In the stratosphere, ozone provides important protection from cancer-causing ultraviolet rays, but closer to the ground it is very hazardous for human health.

If emission levels remain high, this climate penalty is expected to account for "a fifth of all surface ozone concentration increase," WMO scientific officer Lorenzo Labrador told reporters.

He warned that most of that increase will happen over Asia, "and there you have about one quarter of the entire world population."

The WMO called for action, stressing that "a worldwide carbon neutrality emissions scenario would limit the future occurrence of extreme ozone air pollution episodes."

The report points out that air quality and climate are interconnected, since chemicals that worsen air quality are normally co-emitted with greenhouse gases.

"Changes in one inevitably cause changes in the other," it said.

Foreign governments are spending more than 30 times more on fossil fuel projects in Africa than on initiatives to lessen the impacts of the continent's second-biggest killer, air pollution, research showed Wednesday.

The report, released on the International Day of Clean Air, showed how little donor nations spend on improving air quality while ploughing money into dirty energy and infrastructure projects across Africa.

The United Nations estimates that air pollution kills around nine million people globally each year, with fossil fuels accounting for two-thirds of the levels of harmful particulates humans are exposed to.

The financial benefits of improving air quality alone would far exceed the costs of slashing emissions to meet the Paris Agreement temperature goals, according to a landmark United Nations climate science assessment this year.

Yet, as Wednesday's analysis by the Clean Air Fund shows, US, European and Asian governments are still going ahead with fossil fuel-based development projects that will likely worsen already poor air quality in cities and along highways across Africa.

The fund found that just 0.3 percent of African countries' development assistance received between 2015-2021 had been specifically earmarked for air quality projects, despite pollution being responsible for some one in five deaths continent-wide.

During the same period, donor nations provided 36 times more funding for prolonging fossil fuel use in Africa.

"That difference alone is extremely startling," Dennis Appiah, head of the fund's Ghana office and a co-author of the report.

"I think it's also highlighted that most often governments are not paying attention to the issue of air pollution," he told AFP.

"Either they are not conscious of the impact of it, or they do not see it as a problem."

Appiah called air pollution a "silent killer" as its effects are far harder to see and message to communities compared with other climate-linked phenomena such as flooding.

- 'Death sentence' -

An ongoing population boom means Africa will be -- on current birth rates -- home to some 2.5 billion people by 2050, with the UN estimating that 26 countries will double their populations by then.

The vast majority of population growth will occur in urban areas, with much of the infrastructure needed to support increases yet to be built.

The continent is virtually blameless for climate change yet continues to be a hotspot for extreme events linked to global heating.

Appiah said that while Africa's development needs were huge, governments needed to prioritise sustainable ways of electrifying and connecting communities.

"Policymakers are stuck in going through the same traditional chain for development that we see in the West, and also in some of the Asian countries that are now suffering the consequences of some of those decisions," he said.

"I think Africa is positioned to take advantage of some of the technology which exists. We don't have to go through the same process (as developed countries), we can leapfrog to new technologies."

With renewable energy such as wind and solar already frequently cheaper than oil and fossil gas per kilowatt hour, the hope is that African governments can factor in the economic benefits of avoiding air pollution into their development plans.

In a preface to Wednesday's report, Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate said that policies featuring new fossil fuel infrastructure in Africa were "a death sentence for people in communities like mine".

"It's time for governments to hear the voices of people all around the world who are calling for leaders to clean up our air and protect our health," she said.


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