Could air pollution lead to pandemic-style restrictions?

Londoners have been advised to limit outdoor exercise today due to concerns over high pollution levels.

Air pollution is “set to soar over much of the capital” due to “cold, slack air trapping traffic and other emissions”, said London Evening Standard. Polluting particles would usually be dispersed by heavier winds, but “light” gusts have caused a dangerous build-up, explained the UK Air Information Resource.

When a high level of pollution is recorded, at-risk members of the public with lung or heart problems are advised by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs to reduce strenuous outdoor physical activity and people with asthma are warned they may need to use their inhaler more frequently. Others are also advised to head indoors if they begin to experience sore eyes, a cough or sore throat.

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The forecast and subsequent warning come days after London mayor Sadiq Khan warned that “we will replace one public health crisis with another” unless more is done to deliver a greener future for the capital. The mayor bemoaned the city’s “filthy air and gridlocked roads”, calling for residents to “significantly reduce car use in favour of greener means of travel”.

Despite the expansion of the Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) in London last year, the city is yet to see a significant fall in harmful emissions. And UK authorities aren't the only ones to have advised the public take extra caution due to air pollution in recent months.

Air pollution lockdowns

In November last year India’s Supreme Court called for a citywide lockdown in New Delhi in response to a spike in levels of potentially lethal air pollution.

As a “thick, toxic haze” engulfed northern India, said The Washington Post, officials in the capital have already ordered restrictions “reminiscent of the pandemic”, including shutting schools, closing government offices and ordering a halt to construction projects.

The partial shutdown was triggered by “measurements of harmful airborne particles hovering at 20 times the safe limit recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO)”, the paper added.

At a hearing, justices in India’s highest court “ordered authorities to halt all nonessential travel on roads in the national capital region”, NPR said, and called for “tens of millions of people to work from home”.

At the time the Air Quality Index showed that pollution levels in the city were in the low- to mid-400s on a 500-point scale, having been “off the charts” in some areas earlier that month.

Like many other cities worldwide, anti-Covid lockdown measures last year resulted in an improvement in air quality in New Delhi.

Global warnings on air pollution

England and India are by no means the only countries battling air quality problems.

In late 2015, Beijing was forced to call the Chinese capital’s first ever air pollution red alert, in what The Guardian correspondent Tom Phillips described as an “airpocalypse”.

Schools, building sites and factories were told to close, and “millions of cars were ordered off the roads”, as “teams of environmental inspectors fanned out across the surrounding region to ensure that coal-fired power stations and steel mills were not secretly churning out even more filth into the already putrid atmosphere”, Phillips reported.

Similar alerts have been issued in other capital cities too. In Bangkok, almost 450 schools were ordered to shut in early 2020 as the “concentration of killer particles” in the air reached “more than double the healthy limit”, The Independent reported at the time.

“Like many growing Asian cities”, said the paper, the Thai capital “is plagued by vehicle fumes, dust from construction sites and emissions from industry”. And the “burning of stubble and undergrowth in fields in surrounding rural areas” contribute to “much higher pollution levels in the dry, winter months”.

Although such cities are at the epicentre of the global air pollution crisis, European nations have also been badly hit.

Air pollution “causes thousands of deaths a year in the UK due to conditions such as stroke, heart disease, lung cancer and both acute and chronic respiratory diseases”, said Sky News.

An estimated 40,000 UK deaths linked to poor air quality were recorded in in 2019, 4,000 of which were in Greater London”, the broadcaster reported.

The EU has also demanded action to tackle increases in levels of toxic air across the continent.

The European Commission is “making an example of Portugal by suing them over poor air quality”, euronews reported in November last year. Referring Portugal to the EU Court of Justice, the commission said the Iberian nation had “continually and persistently” exceeded the annual nitrogen dioxide limit in three air quality zones, in Lisbon, Porto and Minho.

“And despite two warnings, one in 2019 and one in 2020, it has failed to adopt new roadside measures to cut down on nitrogen dioxide pollution,” said the news site.

‘Clear skies and breathable air’

“Air pollution has long been one of the biggest killers” on Earth, claiming the lives of “an estimated seven million victims annually”, according to the BBC. But a year of Covid lockdowns “showed how quickly we could clear the air”.

Data from the International Energy Agency showed that average activity on the world’s roads fell by almost 50% year-on-year in 2020.

As a result, urban areas began “recording massive reductions in a range of pollutants associated with internal combustion engines”, the broadcaster continued.

The coronavirus crisis has shown “that clear skies and breathable air can be achieved very fast if concrete action is taken to reduce burning of fossil fuels”, said Sunil Dahiya, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

Whether cities globally will take drastic measures like those deliberated by authorities in New Delhi to limit the worst health implications of air pollution remains to be seen.