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As smog so thick you can see it from space continues to smother our region, ICIMOD is sharing expert perspectives on the impacts and solutions to the air crisis. This film, recorded earlier this year in our Kathmandu headquarters, focusses on the links between pollution, health, and poverty.
While 90% of the world’s population breathe polluted air, the highest exposures and health impacts are in low- and middle-income countries.
And within these countries, it is the poorest who will be hardest hit:
🔹Those working outside and or nearest to sources of emissions such as street vendors, traffic police, day labourers, waste-sector workers;
The rural poor who cannot afford to switch from cooking and heating with biomass and coal stoves.
🔹The disproportionate exposures to pollution such populations face can cost these communities their health, and then their livelihoods, hugely compounding and deepening existing social vulnerabilities.
This film features the voices of global and regional experts in the public health impacts of air pollution:
🔹Jill Baumgartner, , Professor, McGill University, Canada
🔹Pallavi Pant, Head of Global Health, Health Effects Institute, USA
🔹Om Kurmi, Associate Professor, Coventry University, UK
🔹Narayan Babu Dhital, Assistant Professor, Tribhuvan University, Nepal
🔹Michal Krzyzanowski, Visiting Professor, Imperial College London, UK
The moral case for action on the air crisis is incontrovertible. "The smog we can see from space right now is destroying our lungs, our hearts, our brains, it is hammering our hospitals, and our economies and accelerating the loss of our frozen water stores," says Pema Gyamtsho, Director General of ICIMOD, who earlier this year convened a major science-policy dialogue on the issue with key regional stakeholders in Thimphu, Bhutan. "We need an air pollution revolution in our region, and ICIMOD is standing by to support diverse stakeholders – from science to policy to industry – to bring about urgently needed change."
For more on ICIMOD’s work on air pollution go to: icimod.org/clean-air/
To learn about the situation on the ground right now and the public health event go to: blog.icimod.org/clean-air/air-…
#AirPollution #SouthAsia @HEISoGA @FCDOGovUK
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