Some seven million people die each year – one in eight deaths globally – as a result of exposure to air pollution, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which confirms that it is the most serious environmental problem. risk to human health .
In Europe it causes more than 400,000 premature deaths annually, despite improvements in recent years, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA). Of these, some 27,000 are registered in Spain . In reality, no one dies directly from pollution, but rather it aggravates previous diseases, such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and different types of cancer.
Clean air should be a primary goal for health authorities around the world. To do this, the first measure is to identify those responsible for dirtying it: in cities the most important exposure occurs, caused by road traffic, but also by industrial and energy activities or emissions from heating and cooking in homes.
Institutions should be stricter in controls and mandatory legal levels of emissions: 22% of Spaniards breathe air above the legal limits , although the WHO quadruples this percentage, according to Ecologists in Action recalls.
The actions that can be carried out are very diverse: public transport and other alternatives to private vehicles must be promoted, low emission zones should be set up in cities where only the least polluting mobility systems can travel, prohibiting domestic fuels harmful to the quality of the air and support greener systems, promote clean technologies in industrial and energy activities and develop more measurement systems and scientific research aimed at solving the problem . In this sense, in laboratories around the world, including Spain, different compounds are being tested to combat pollution.
