Overview

CHAPTER 3

Blue Skies for Healthy and Prosperous Cities

OVERVIEW

Ambient air pollution (AAP)—or outdoor air pollution—causes severe adverse health effects including premature deaths in the Middle East and North Africa. The region’s urban air is among the world’s most polluted, exposing its residents to air pollution levels 10 times higher than considered safe. No capital or major city in the region for which data are available meets guidelines on maximum safe particulate matter (PM) concentrations. Furthermore, these capitals and major cities are often considerably more polluted than their income levels would suggest.

This chapter documents the effects of AAP in terms of lives lost and reduced health as well as reduced labor supply and productivity. AAP is estimated to induce several hundred thousand deaths in the Middle East and North Africa every year. It also significantly affects morbidity, increasing the risk for several potentially deadly diseases and leading to large numbers of hospitalizations, sick days, and other adverse health impacts. As a result, AAP is one of the largest threats to the livelihoods of large portions of the region’s population. It also disproportionately affects the poor, who often cannot afford protective measures and often perform manual labor outdoors, hence increasing their intake of air pollutants through heavy breathing. Gender inequality is yet another concern because it is usually women who take care of family members who become sick (predominantly the youngest and the oldest), further leading to lost productivity and income.

As such, the effects of elevated AAP are in stark contrast to those of a green, resilient, and inclusive development (GRID) framework1 along

many of its dimensions. They contribute to a degradation of livability in the Middle East and North Africa.

Given the severe negative impacts of AAP, it is alarming that not much is known about its exact sources in most of the region’s cities. This paucity of information severely hampers policy makers’ ability to formulate responses to effectively and efficiently lower concentrations of air pollutants. Proper and thorough research on the various sources of air pollution should include source apportionment studies, emissions inventories, and dispersion modeling—all of which should be supported and expanded to uncover the main contributors to air pollution in the region’s cities. Despite some advances in this respect, overall knowledge remains sparse, and this calls for broad research efforts.

Despite the limited information about the sources of air pollution in the Middle East and North Africa, this chapter identifies several important priority policies that the region’s decision makers should approach in a timely manner:

• First, raising public awareness about air pollution and its source—and how individual actions can contribute toward solving it—is important to both inform and mobilize the population, whose support is critical to the success of most policies.

• Second, the pervasiveness of fossil fuel subsidies and low environmental taxes are natural points of departure for reforms that simultaneously lower the tax burden in other areas, in the sense of “eco-social” tax reforms. Reforms of such subsidies and taxes have the dual advantage of decreasing air pollution and easing strained public budgets. They also have ramifications for the issue of marine plastics by raising the prices of feedstock and energy input for the production of plastics. It is vital to plan such subsidy reforms with a view toward the effects on especially low-income households, and to make proactive provisions, such as reducing income taxes, or offering compensation, which is especially important for low-income households.

• Third, strengthening public transportation systems is critical to induce a modal shift away from personal, motorized transportation and toward more sustainable transportation patterns.

• Fourth, more stringent industrial emissions standards should be implemented and the existing ones enforced properly.

• Fifth, strengthening solid waste management (SWM) in the region’s economies is imperative to reduce uncontrolled burning of both municipal and agricultural waste and has cross-benefits by reducing the amount of plastics flowing into the region’s seas (as chapter 4 will discuss).