Jack Tame: We need to sort out air pollution

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

Pop quiz! What of these causes the highest number of premature New Zealand deaths?

Bowel cancer? Diabetes? Road crashes? Melanoma? Air pollution?

This will seem unbelievable to many Kiwis, but according to the Ministry of the Environment and Statistics New Zealand, here in good old clean-and-green New Zealand, air pollution kills more people than all of those other causes, combined.

Think about that! Diabetes, bowel cancer, road crashes and melanoma... Put them in a blender and add them all together, and air pollution still comes out at the top of the macabre pops.

According to the study released today, even though air pollution standards have improved, in 2019, air pollution was associated with 3200 deaths!

In a country our size, with our wealth, and our regulatory framework, that's a disgraceful figure.

According to the triennial study, one in ten deaths in 2019 was attributable to air pollution. The social costs are in the billions of dollars, and that doesn't include the increasingly-well-documented impact on brain function and intelligence that comes from the prolonged exposure to air pollution.

Like all health stats, of course, poor people in poor communities are the most negatively affected.

The biggest cause is no big surprise: Traffic pollution. But as the science improves, the impact of traffic on air pollution only gets worse.

The report suggests roughly seventy percent of those air pollution deaths and seventy percent of more-than-13,000 hospitalisations from air pollution are caused by traffic pollution. And where you take cars off the road, lo and behold... The air quality improves.

If ever you needed a greater reason for better investment in public transport services, for massively speeding up the EV rollout and for congestion charging in our cities... This report is it.

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