The Health Costs of Air Pollution

Many cities in the US have been experiencing smoky and hazy skies lately. Some of you have probably been affected by poor air quality due to the ongoing wildfires in Canada that are causing pollution to travel as far as Chicago and New York. On a former episode of our podcast, we spoke with some of the leading experts on air pollution about how this problem has been getting worse and the cost we’re all paying for it.

We’re taking a summer break while we work on some special episodes and will be back in August, but in the meantime we wanted to share some of our best and most relevant episodes. These episodes contain some fascinating and life-changing information for new and returning listeners.

We can’t always see the consequences of air pollution around us, but it’s costing us years off our lives. According to a new Air Quality Life Index report from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), air pollution is taking 2.2 years off the average global life expectancy. In some of the most polluted regions in the world, residents are expected to lose an average five years of their lives, if the current high levels of pollution persist.

While smog seem like a difficult problem to tackle, some countries have proven it’s possible to clean up the air. In the past seven years, China has reduced air pollution as much as the United States has in the past three decades. And since India’s Gujarat state launched the world's first clean air market in 2019, they’ve been successful in cutting particulate pollution by at least 20 percent.

In this episode, we speak with EPIC’s Air Quality Programs Director Christa Hasenkopf and EPIC’s South Asia Director Anant Sudarshan about why we need to treat air pollution as a global health threat—and what we can do about it.

Big Brains is sponsored by the Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

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