Pollution fouling the lungs of millions of people in Asia
A new UN report details the effect of air pollution on Asia:
The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, cooking on dung or wood fires and coal-fired power plants, these plumes rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.
“The imperative to act has never been clearer,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in Beijing, which the report identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities, and where the report was released.
The brownish haze, sometimes in a layer more than a mile thick and clearly visible from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea. In the spring, it sweeps past North and South Korea and Japan. Sometimes the cloud drifts as far east as California.
No Japanese cities made the UN’s list of 13 very polluted megacities, but it does seem that the smog clouds produced in China and other countries tend to drift over here, a problem that has led the Japanese government to recently push for international emission standards that cover entire industries and do not distinguish between developed and developing countries.
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