Welcome to zero. I'm oscoboid. Over the past couple of days, smoke coming from Canada's worst ever forest fire season has blanketed much of the country and spread southeast to the United States, smashing pollution records in both countries. On Wednesday afternoon, New York had the worst air quality of any city worldwide. As the smoke turnder sky are sickly orange. It looked like it was gloomy looking. It just I don't know, it looked like something out of a movie, apocalyptic type of movie.
I think everyone in our school was freaked out. It was so dark first of all, and then everything was orange.
It felt like weird, sort of horrifying to see, not only how much of an effect it has, just because I mean the entire city was lit yellow, and just how far everything travels and what that means for the environment.
Wildfires are not new, but they are increasing in scale and intensity as we warm the planet, exposing more and more people to dangerous levels of air pollution. So today on zero, I'm talking with ACTUA about the effects of that pollution on the body and what you can do take yourself from it. Actually, currently more than four hundred fires are burning across Canada, with smoke blanketing cities across
North America. And this is going to have huge impacts on people's health as they breathe in the polluted air. But North America isn't alone in this. How big is the problem of air pollution globally?
It's actually quite big. You know, we're talking about it during a time of an intense event. But the World Health Organization estimates that nine million people die every year from air pollution. And just to put that in context, about fifty five million people die every year, So that means twenty percent of deaths annually are in some way linked to bad air. Because again the World Health Organization estimates that ninety nine percent of people alive today are
breathing air that is bad. Some are breathing air that's very bad. So you said nine million people are killed anonally by this. What are the main sources of air pollution? So about fifty percent of those deaths are from indoor air pollution, and that is mainly from people burning wood and biomass, which is the choice of fuel in poor countries even today, but also things like gastos and even
kerosene heaters. The other half is from outdoor air pollution, so that's things like industrial emissions or from exhaust of vehicles in cities and increasingly wildfire smoke. And when we say pollution, what kind of things are we actually talking about? What counts as pollution? That's right, Like air pollution can be a lot of things. So there's carbon monoxide, there's ozone, there's nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and all of those things can have harmful impact. But the one that we should
focus on today is particulate matter pollution. And that's basically as the name suggests, these tiny particles. They are sometimes unburned fossil fuels or unburned wood or even dust that are very very small. You probably have heard the term PM two point five, where the PM stands for particulate matter and two five sands for the size of the particle, which is measured in microns, and two point five microns
is tiny. Microns is one millionth of a meter, And one way to put it is, if you had to take a human hair, you could fit thirty different PM two point five particles on its width. So these are very tiny particles. When people inhale it, it first goes into their lung, but very quickly it's absorbed into the bloodstream and then it just ends up everywhere in the body. So ends up in the bloodstream, is traveling around your body, whatever the speed of blood is. That can't be good, right,
and no, it's very bad. The thing is, the more we've studied about air pollution, the more we've found out just how bad it is. And it affects the body in many different ways. So one reason is because when these particles end up in different organs, the body thinks it's a virus or a bacteria and it starts attacking it and there's inflammation and that can cause organs to perform poorly or fail.
Sometimes with any infection, what normally happens is you get that information, your body's immune system takes care of the bias of bacteria and they then disappear. But if you've got long term exposure to air pollution, it's constantly triggering your immune system, then you're going to have this constant negative response that damages parts of your body. That's right.
I mean, in the short term, people who are exposed to air pollution experience coughing and stinging eyes, running nose, chest, pain, even headaches, and those difficulties can go away after you get to breathe clean air again. But if you're exposed to air pollution in the long term, which is the reality for many parts of the world even today, Delli, where my wife comes from, is blanketed in air pollution almost all through the year, and it's very bad air pollution.
So in those places especially, the impact of air pollution can be increased risk of lung diseases, even cancer. There can be impacts on the brain because those particles can enter the brain, so there is risk of stroke, increased demas, and there are even studies showing cognitive impact on students who are exposed to air pollution and their performance in school.
And there's intense impact on vulnerable people. So young people whose bodies are not fully developed can suffer developmental problems from breathing in air pollution. Old people who can't recover as quickly from these impacts will suffer because their health outcomes are worse and perhaps their underlying conditions become worse.
And pregnant people have perhaps the worst outcomes because they are carrying an unborn child and that child is really developing very very quickly and air pollution can have pretty negative consequences.
And on that topic in particular, our colleagues recently published the story and a documentary film to go alongside it about what they called bushfire babies, which is kind of a horrible term to have to use, but this is all about the lasting health impacts of Australia's twenty nineteen to twenty twenty Black Summer bushfires, one of the worst
bushfires on record. There No one's quick to link anything to the fires here, but yeah, I know in my heart that the breathing issues happened straight after the fires, if not during. In the short term. How do you protect yourself from air pollution? You know our masks back in Are we going back to COVID days? Yes, they kind of are. I mean ideally, in these conditions you shouldn't go out. You should be able to check your
air quality index. You know, just google your city and air quality or even your neighborhood sometimes in air quality and I'll tell you a number. If that number is more than one hundred and fifty, it's actually a bad idea to go out. Yeah, So, just for context, on Wednesday, the air quality rating in New York was actually at around three hundred and fifty. That's right.
I mean, if you do have to go outside, try and take care by putting on a mask, an N ninety five mask or something similar which titally fits is a good idea. You know, avoid activities that would cause you to breathe heavily, don't exercise, and if you can afford it, get an air filter indoors. So increasingly in cities like Delhi, people who can afford it buy air filters and run them constantly all through the day to be able to have cleaner air at least while they are at home.
And then thinking a bit longer term, you know, last year we traveled to Ostwa together to interview Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and one of the things that we quized him on then was how over the last twenty years, because of the increased forest fires, Canada's forests have gone from a carbon sync to actually becoming a carbon source. So reducing forest fires is critical both for this topic of air polution we're talking about, but also for reducing
carbon emissions. What can be done to actually reduce wildfires and try and stem this source of pollution it's a good question. And you know, when I asked Justin Trudeau this very question, he stumbled with an answer, and that just shows that even a climate progressive leader like him struggles in a country the size of Canada with such huge forests. Of course, the wildfires are naturally occurring events too, and some of it can be helpful to a forest.
But what we need to do now is to understand how on a warming planet that these fires can become
very intense, very quickly. And there are tools being developed both from ancient knowledge of managing a forest through prescribe burns as they are called, so that you can control the amount of fuel that's available when a fire does come along, but there are other ways in which you could map and have management around dousing fires quickly, something that the US West Coast is really at the forefront of, just given how intense those fires can be. And sometimes
it's not people, it's infrastructure. So again in the West Coast there have been bankruptcies. So PGNE, a utility in California, has declared bankruptcy tied to having fires that were started by power lines, and so utilities are increasingly either if they can afford it put those cables underground, or make sure that the cables don't actually go and get in contact with trees and wood moving from moldfires. To air pollution more generally, the world actually has got a decent
track record of fixing air pollution problems. London back in the nineteen fifties was notorious for a smog that's since been fixed, and on a global level, in nineteen seventy nine, major industrial countries came together to sign the Convention on Long Range trans Boundary Air Pollution, which was targeting sulfur emissions that were contributing to acid rain. And that treaty was also a huge success, but still nine million people a year die from air pollution. So do we need
a new kind of treaty to deal with this? Yeah.
So that dealt with a very specific kind of pollutant, which is sulfur, and that was causing acid rain, and that had all kinds of impact, not just human health impacts, but also impacts on agricultural productivity, on the infrastructure and the quality of buildings. You know, there were places around the world, including the taj Mahal, that were turning yellow because of increased sulfur pollution. So that was a really
interesting way in which we tackle pollution. There's another example of how we tackle air pollution in the Montreal Protocol, which is to do directly in a way with climate change, because the gases that go into refrigerators, for example, had a huge impact on creating a hole in the ozone layer but also warming the planet because they're very intense greenhouse gases, and this treaty forced companies around the world to come up with an alternative. So regulations, especially globally
agreed upon regulations, can have a big impact. We are starting to see some experiments of that kind happening around cities to try and deal with air pollution from tailpipes. So we live in London, and London's kind of at the forefront of this because it's created what is known as the Ultra Low emission Zone. A bit of a mouthful, but really it just tells you that there are places in London where you cannot bring in a big polluting car.
So either you bring in an electric car or a very new car that has a higher standard on particulate matter pollution, or if you have to bring in a polluted car, you have to pay a hefty fee to bring it in and that has made the air quality in London just get so much better over the past decade, and more and more cities, especially in Europe, are starting to adopt this method.
And we're talking today about wildfire, smoke and evolution because of the events that are happening in Canada and that are impacting major cities like New York. But similar fiers do happen every year all around the world. Malaysia and Singapore suffer from these kinds of events most years. Deli, you've mentioned bushfires in Australia helped define their elections last year.
Yes, nowhere is immune. That's what Arna Gretta Hunter of the Australian National University, told Bloomberg that she worries that people think there are privileged parts in the world that are not vulnerable to climate events and that's just not the case and what's happen right now proves it.
Thank you for listening to Zero. If you've found this explainer useful, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can email us at zero pod at Bloomberg dot net. We've linked to more reporting on this topic in the show notes zero's producers me Oscar Boyd and senior producers Christine driscoll Our. Theme music is composed by Wandy. Special thanks this week to Janet Babin for the voices from New York, as well as Kira Benjam, Sarah heirj Kendra, P. R. Lewis
and Todd Woody. We'll be back next week.