DCRBN’s Post

Transcript

They've been massively overlooked. They're responsible for half of global warming so far and nobody's really paying any attention. Black carbon or soot is what happens when a fuel or something is only partially combusted. Bits of black particles are coming out, and you can see that when you see black smoke coming out of an exhaust pipe or a chimney or when you make a fire. And because it's black and it's black bits of stuff in the atmosphere, it's absorbing. Beat and then it's reradiating it, so it's very warming for the climate. But when ozone is closer to the ground, it's called tropospheric ozone is actually really bad for climate change because it's a greenhouse gas for our health, because it really affects our lungs and respiratory systems. And actually for agriculture, it really harms crop production and reduces crop yields up to more than 25%. So for all of these reasons, we do not want ozone close to the ground and the troposphere. It's a solution could be electric vehicles, Another one is burning crop stubble in farms or burning waste in the open air. And then the chemical industry produces a lot of volatile organic compounds and they're not tackled at all by any air pollution or climate change protocol. So that's a real low hanging fruit to tackle if you start to look at super pollutants. Me saying is the one super pollutant that has had a bit of attention so far through things like the Global Methane Pledge, where countries have been voluntarily choosing to reduce their emissions. And the way that they do it is from sectors like agriculture, so different feeds for cows, for example, so that they emit less methane through stopping oil and gas leaks and through reducing. Landfill and landfill sites, which often are emitting methane as the waste decomposes. Through the Alliance for Clean Air, which the World Economic Forum is the secretariat for, 20 businesses have committed to measure and reduce their air pollution footprint. And just one example, IKEA. Or working out where the Super pollutants are in their supply chain and where they could target climate change mitigation to reduce them the fastest. This year, for the first time, the Global Risks report that the World Economic Forum produces has a chapter on pollution. And what we've seen is that the 900 business leaders, civil society leaders and politicians that fill in the survey about what they think are the world's biggest risks are seeing pollution as both a short and a long term risk. And one of the reasons for that is that in terms of health, air pollution. Has overtaken smoking as a cause of death for the first time, so we're seeing more than 8 million deaths a year from air pollution, which is more than tobacco.