Beijing and New Delhi are five times more polluted than New York. Greenhouse gas emissions in Asia are set to treble within 25 years. China may have to forfeit the Olympic Games.
Jakarta (AsiaNews/Agencies) – The most polluted cities in the world are in Asia. The metropolitan centres of this continent have pollution levels that are five times higher than those of Paris, London and New York, exceeding by five or six times the maximum level recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).
This data emerged at the 2006 Better Air Quality Conference that closed in Yogyakarta last week. Meanwhile, a report by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has predicted that greenhouse gas emissions in Asia will treble within 25 years.
Big cities are saturated with microscopic dust that embeds itself in the lungs causing respiratory disease and cancer. According to ADB data for 2005, the most polluted city is Beijing with 142 micrograms of particles of pollution dust per cubic meter, compared to Paris with 22, London 24 and New York 27. It was such findings that prompted the International Olympic Committee to warn the Chinese capital that it “risks losing the Games if it doesn’t do something to improve its air quality.”
New Delhi and other big cities of China and India are also more polluted than western cities. Between 30 and 70% of pollution is attributable to motor vehicles, which are projected to increase in number. Leilei Liu, the program manager of China's Urban Sustainable Transportation Research Centre, said 99% of the Chinese population does not own a car, while in the United States there are 77 cars per 100 people.
The ADB report said the increase in greenhouse gas emissions is largely due to pollution in cities due to traffic and heating. Experts predict that cars in Asia will double every five years and in China, they will increase by 15 times by 2030, reaching a total of 190 million cars, with carbon dioxide emissions rising by 3.4 times for China and 5.8 times for India.
Anumita Roychowdhury, associate director of the Centre for Science and the Environment in India, said that action taken in recent years "is only stabilizing the problem.”
Michal Krzyzanowski, WHO expert, estimated that air pollution causes 537,000 premature deaths in Asia every year.
Experts believe the situation is the fruit of a development model followed by India and China that focuses on the needs of industry without respecting the environment and the public. Tokyo, with 35 million residents, has lower pollution levels than in western cities. Even Bangkok has seen its – still high – pollution level drop by 50% in a decade, thanks to strict controls on car emissions and heavy fines for the most polluting motorcycles. In Singapore, pollution is “only” as much as the levels in US cities, thanks to heavy taxes on cars, limiting traffic in the central business district and extensive public transportation. But the city has 4.5 million residents, much less than the big cities of other countries.
Pollution in China and India affects neighbouring countries too. Alexis Lau, an expert in Hong Kong, estimates that 60 to 70% of the microscopic dust particles found in the city’s air emanate from factories and cities in the Pearl River Delta in China.
Japan has complained that soot from Chinese coal power stations is covering its lakes. Coal emissions from India and China are polluting the air in Bangladesh especially in the dry season between November and March. Land-clearing forest fires in Indonesia send a choking haze across Singapore and Malaysia. Meshkat And Ahmed Chowdhury, deputy secretary in Bangladesh's Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources, said: "We are being squeezed by the two great polluters [China and India]".
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