Where there’s smoke, there’s fire: Asia & Air Pollution

Author of a recent study on the
global effects of fire, says this “could lead to a dangerous feedback as more
burning releases more carbon into the atmosphere, further driving climate
change. Meanwhile, Asian countries fare poorly when it comes to air pollution,
although Bhutan, Japan and Singapore rank among the better places, according to
the World Health Organisation’s first global survey.

Straits Times (28 September 2011):

GENEVA: Asian countries fare
poorly when it comes to air pollution, although Bhutan, Japan and Singapore
rank among the better places, according to the World Health Organisation’s
first global survey.

Cities in Canada and the US were
rated among the best, while those in the Middle East were among the worst. The
south- western Iranian city of Ahwaz in fact walked away with the unfortunate
distinction of having the highest measured level of airborne particles smaller
than 10 micrometres.

WHO released the list on Monday,
to highlight the need to reduce outdoor air pollution, which is estimated to
cause 1.34 million premature deaths each year.

The global body said investments
to lower pollution levels quickly pay off because of lower disease rates and,
therefore, lower health-care costs.

The list, which relies on
country-reported data over the past several years, measures the concentration
of airborne particles smaller than 10 micrometres – so-called PM10s – for
almost 1,100 cities.

WHO recommends an upper limit of
20 micrograms for PM10s, which can cause serious respiratory problems in
humans. They are mostly sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide from power plants,
vehicle exhausts and industry.

The world average for PM10 was
estimated to be 71 micrograms per cu m.

Singapore’s outdoor air pollution
level was significantly lower at 32 micrograms per cu m, for 2009, the latest
available figures. And this was an improvement over the pollution five years
ago, when it was estimated to be 48 micrograms per cu m.

Still the Republic was behind
Bhutan – which at 18 micrograms per cu m had the lowest levels of pollution in
Asia – and Japan, with 22 micrograms per cu m.

Cities in Pakistan and India,
such as Quetta and Kanpur, and the Mongolian capital Ulan Bator fared among the
worst on the pollution scale.

Mr Mohammad Hasan, 39, of
Karachi, Pakistan, said attempts to improve air quality in the port city of 18
million – such as by replacing heavily polluting buses with vehicles using
compressed natural gas – are being undermined by bigger polluters which are
‘playing havoc with the lives of Karachi’s populace’.

‘Industries and factories are
emitting thick clouds of smoke, and no government agency is out there to check
them or correct them,’ the bank employee said.

Elsewhere in the region,
pollution in heavily populated China, at 98 micrograms per cu m, was way above
the world average.

China’s Environmental Protection
Ministry said in a report last year that a third of the nation’s 113 cities
surveyed failed to meet national air standards. And a World Bank report said 16
of the world’s 20 cities with the worst air are located in China, which relies
heavily on coal to meet its energy needs.

Myanmar, with 94 micrograms per
cu m, and Indonesia, with 55 micrograms per cu m, figured among countries with
the most pollution in South-east Asia.

The WHO said the reasons for high
pollution levels varied, but that often rapid industrialisation and the use of
poor quality fuels for transportation and electricity generation are to blame.

In India, major metropolitan
areas such as New Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata have banned the construction of new
power plants within city limits, while existing ones are being shut down or
relocated.

But at the same time, a lack of
public transport has led to an explosion of privately owned cars and SUVs as
the economy booms, with the number of heavily polluting diesel vehicles
increasing 10-fold, as diesel is highly subsidised by the government.

At the other end of the list are
cities in Canada and the United States, which benefit from lower population
density, favourable climates and stricter air pollution regulation.

Estonia topped the list with the
best air quality, at 11 micrograms per cu m, Mauritius ranked second, with 12
micrograms, and Australia tied with Canada for the third spot, on 13 micrograms
per cu m.

Source: www.wildsingaporenews.blogspot.com

Michael Richardson in the Straits
Times (26 September 2011):

Although Singapore and Malaysia
have escaped the worst effects of the 2011 “haze” pollution from fires in
Indonesia, this will not be the case in future if the average global
temperature continues to rise as many scientists predict.

The annual dry period in
Indonesia is ending. The Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency in
Jakarta said recently that the rainy season has started in Aceh and North
Sumatra, and will spread to other areas by the end of the year, dousing fires.

But this is likely to be just a
breathing space. As the world gets hotter, the risk of more and bigger fires
increases.

2010 was the hottest year on
record, with global temperatures 0.53 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990
average. This year is not as hot so far. But serious drought has still gripped
parts of the Americas and Africa.

Blair Trewin, an Australian
climatologist, says that warm extremes are increasingly outnumbering cold
extremes as the influence of the background warming trend strengthens.

David Bowman, Professor of
Environmental Change Biology at the University of Tasmania and lead author of a
recent study on the global effects of fire, says this “could lead to a
dangerous feedback as more burning releases more carbon into the atmosphere,
further driving climate change.”

He and his international team of researchers
are concerned at the total impact of four kinds of fires, and the way they are
combining to intensify climate impacts.

The four are natural fires that
occur regardless of humans, for example by a lightning strike; tame fire used
by hunter-gatherers to manage landscapes for game and wild food production; agricultural
fire to clear land cheaply, and grow food and plantation crops – a widespread
practice in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia; and industrial fire to
power modern societies that have switched from using living to fossilized
plants in the form of coal, oil and natural gas as the primary fuel.

Dr Bowman warns that the
excessive combustion of fossil fuels to generate electricity, power heavy
industry and run modern transport is driving climate change and may completely
overwhelm human capacities to control fire.

Fire has been around since
shortly after plants colonized the surface of the Earth over 400 million years
ago. Humans learned how to use and control it.

However, a group of specialists
commissioned by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)
reported in May that in many parts of the world, the number of large wildfires
has been increasing at an “alarming” rate, causing ever-higher suppression
costs, property losses and environmental damage.

The biggest and most damaging,
which the report calls “mega-fires”, overwhelm efforts to extinguish them, even
in developed countries that have made major investments in fire-fighting
capacity, better predictive systems, improved technology and cooperation, and
larger fleets of aircraft to drop water and fire-retardent chemicals from the
air.

Mega-fires exceed all efforts at
control until fire-fighters get a favorable change in weather or the fire runs
out of combustible fuel to burn.

China’s 1987 Great Black Dragon
Fire may mark the start of the mega-fire phenomenon in the modern era. It
killed over 200 people and burned about 1.2 million hectares of virgin pine
forest.

The specialists commissioned by
the FAO focused on eight megafires since 1997, in Indonesia, Brazil, the United
States, Greece, Botswana, Australia, Russia and Israel. They found that nearly
all had human causes. They were either lit intentionally or by negligence.

The Indonesian fires in 1997-98,
raged out of control for months, burning over 9.7 million hectares and
releasing approximately 700 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere, making them one of the world’s largest pollution sources. The smoke
engulfed Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia, disrupting transport and
acting as blanket that trapped other pollutants harmful to human health.

Wildfires release a range of
chemicals into the atmosphere, similar to those from fossil fuel burning. They
include the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, but also other air
pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic
compounds, aerosols and fine particles of soot.

The gaseous pollutants also
influence tropospheric ozone formation, a pollutant as well as a potent
greenhouse gas.

Gabriele Pfister, a scientist at
the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, has
investigated how smoke from forest fires travels and its impact on air quality
far from the fires.

She says that about half the
world’s air pollution comes from wildfires and that a bad fire year can result
in pollution from the fires circling the globe.

Dr Bowman says that managing
flammable landscapes is one of the big climate change adaption challenges,
equal to the challenge of sea level rise in densely populated, low-lying
coastal zones in Asia and elsewhere.

This is a warning ASEAN countries
should heed. They should work more closely together to improve land management
and fire prevention.

- The writer is a visiting senior
research fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies.

Source: www.iseas.edu.sg