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New Study Explored the Link Between Toxic Pollution and Climate Risks

by Saisruthi Sankaranarayanan on Jul 22 2021 6:05 PM

New Study Explored the Link Between Toxic Pollution and Climate Risks
Countries that are at the risk of facing consequences of climate change are more likely to meet the highest risks of toxic pollution, found a new study by researchers from the University of Notre Dame.
The scientists on the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have focused on human-induced climate change for more than thirty years. They even published a special report regarding the danger of global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The new study published on PLOS ONE sought to derive the relationship between the global distribution of toxic pollution and the impacts of climate change.

The team collected and analyzed three datasets to measure the distribution of toxic pollution and climate change worldwide.

• ND-GAIN: An index of 182 countries that summarizes a country's vulnerability and exposure to climate impacts risks. It also tells about a country's readiness to improve climate resilience

• EPI: Ranks 180 countries on 24 performance indicators across 10 issue categories covering environmental health and ecosystem vitality

• GAHP: Estimates the number of toxic pollution deaths for a country, including deaths caused by exposure to toxic air, water, soil, and chemical pollution globally

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They also measured the correlations between the distribution of toxic environments, total deaths that occurred due to pollution, and climate risk. The authors further created a measure called "Target" that combines a country's climate impacts risk, toxic pollution risk, and potential readiness to mitigate these risks.

On applying this, they found that ten countries such as Singapore, Rwanda, China, India, Solomon Islands, Bhutan, Botswana, Georgia, the Republic of Korea, and Thailand should concentrate more on mitigating the risks. In contrast, Equatorial Guinea, Iraq, Jordan, the Central African Republic, and Venezuela have outstanding governance that effectively addresses pollution effects.

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"Given that a large portion of the world's population lives in countries at higher toxic pollution and climate impacts risk, understanding where and how to target in pollution risk mitigation is critical to maximizing reductions of potential human harm," concluded the authors.



Source-Medindia


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