| Advertisement |
BEIJING, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- China's toxic air is killing 4,400 people a day or an estimated 1.6 million a year, a U.S. study finds. The scientific findings from Berkeley Earth in Berkeley, Calif., used statistical methods similar to the ones the research firm used to find increase in world average temperatures were caused "almost entirely" by human activity, The New York Times reported.
Advertisement
The new estimates of heart, lung and stroke problems caused by bad air also show 38 percent of China's population live in regions with long-term air quality the Environmental Protection Agency would deem unhealthy.
"It's a very big number," Robert Rohde, the lead author of the paper, told The Guardian.
"It's a little hard to wrap your mind around the numbers. Some of the worst in China is to the southwest of Beijing."
That finding indicates area pollution could provide a challenge to the Chinese government's efforts to solve the city's pollution problems ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics.
China's coal-fired heating systems are mostly responsible for releasing particulate pollution into the air and the Beijing mayor's restrictions on vehicles and replacement of coal with natural gas at utilities is not enough, according to Elizabeth Muller, Berkeley Earth executive director.
A southwestern industrial region in Hebei Province 200 miles away exports much of its smog to China's capital, but Beijing is not the only urban area with serious pollution problems.
In April Greenpeace East Asia found 90 percent of 360 Chinese cities failed to meet national air quality standards in the first three months of 2015, when coal is burned to heat homes.
China's government has been wary of providing transparent data on pollution-related deaths in the country. Censors regularly destroy information on websites that might lead to unrest. In March, a critically acclaimed documentary on climate change was banned from the Internet when the party's central propaganda department ordered websites to delete the film.
