If the global effort is made to fight health risks from poisonous pollution and climate change, where do they have to concentrate? Low-income countries produce more toxic pollution, but in the process of building things consumed in high-income countries.
At the same time, high-income countries are a greater source of climate risk but the impact is more felt in low-income countries.
Researchers at Notre Dame University and Princeton University have come up with answers, identifying India as the fourth best place to take advantage of mitigation efforts.
This study, published in the Open ‘Ploo’ access journal on Wednesday, analyzed data from 176 countries with three aspects.
“We develop (list) by first assessing which countries are most at risk of being affected by poisonous pollution and (from) climate.
Then we see the institutional capacity or readiness of these countries to work against these risks in various ways,” said Marcantonio , “If a city, region, country, etc.
does not have institutional capacity to implement the program, every money invested has the potential to be wasted.” Based on how these three factors interact, this study found Singapore is best positioned in terms of return on efforts and Libya, the worst.
China came third, after Rwanda, and Bhutan, sixth.
The data used in the study shows India at the highest risk of toxic pollution in the world (China 14) and placed 49th on the climate vulnerability index (China is 112).
It was also lagging behind “readiness” – at 110 of 176 countries.
“The readiness is basically the size of the institutional capacity of a country to deal with the environmental risks they face.
This does not mean that they do it …
but only that the capacity is there to do so,” said Marcantonio.
In India, the newspaper said the annual death of 23.5% was associated with poisonous pollution, which meant 2.3 million early deaths every year.
“China is the leading GHG (greenhouse gas) emitter in the world and India is on track to join the peak in the future,” he added.
Then, how is India ranked fourth? “Top two countries in our top 5 …
Results, China and India, are developed substantially economically and hold prominent geopolitical strength.
They are the largest countries on the planet, representing more than 2.5 billion people,” said the newspaper that.
So, the impact of all efforts will be strengthened soon.
“Apart from this high level, the recently developed national policy and the resulting impact shows that the benefits of augmenting facilitation of these changes (through efforts and incentives of targeted policies) are large and can be achieved,” he added.
“There is strong potential for additional benefits of efforts focused on China and India in reduction of risks for neighboring countries and other countries at risk of climate change.” Marcantonio said, “I think our work highlights the need for an international policy scheme to overcome uneven risk distribution and the cause of the risk.” This study bridges other important gaps – on mutual risk dependence on poisonous pollution and non-toxic (GHG).
“There was no previous study that analyzed the shared global distribution of these risks or offered evidence-based arguments on how to overcome the shared effects of both risks efficiently,” said the newspaper.
In fact, there is no international comprehensive policy – such as the Paris climate agreement for GHG – for poisonous pollution at all.
“But why until now overlapping has been underexplored? To be honest I don’t know,” said Marcantonio.
This observation is why this research was conducted.
“In my training as an environmental manager, I began to pay attention to the separation of policy domestically here in US and international environmental policies – some for greenhouse gases (GHG) and others for poisonous pollution, although many of them came from the same source” said Marcantonio.
“That doesn’t make sense to me.” So, he began to develop a method for tracking and measuring this.
“This of course Nexus is very unpunished which collectively creates one of the biggest threats to human health globally.”