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Over the past twenty to thirty years, various movements and organizations across the globe have been fighting to protect and preserve the environment. There are those that try to reduce plastic waste in the oceans, those that try to save endangered species, and those that boycott the use of non-renewable resources. But perhaps most prevalent of all are those that try to reduce our negative impact on the atmosphere, whether that be by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, reversing ozone depletion, or simply raising awareness. But just how effective is this activism? To answer this question, we decided to take a look into the annual mortality rates attributed to air pollution around the world as a whole and in a few specific countries. Here's what we found:
There are three main types of air pollution that affect humans: outdoor particulate matter, indoor air pollution, and outdoor ozone pollution. As shown by the pie chart, in the year 2019, outdoor particulate matter was the leading cause of air pollution based deaths. 58.5% of all deaths were attributed to outdoor particulate matter, while 32.3% were attributed to indoor air pollution and 9.23% were attributed to outdoor ozone pollution. As shown in the graph above, deaths caused by all three of these forms of pollution have dropped since twenty or thirty years ago. Deaths attributed to indoor air pollution have gone down the most, dropping from about 61 people per every 100,000 to only about 21 per 100,000. Deaths attributed to outdoor ozone pollution have dropped the least, going from about 11 per 100,000 to only about 6 per 100,000. This, however, may be caused by the fact that outdoor ozone pollution is already the least common of the three measured on the graph. Regardless, it is still evident that deaths caused by all three kinds of air pollution have dropped since the year 1990, which could suggest that the environmental activism is indeed succeeding. However, to verify this, we decided to review the data in a slightly different way: country by country.
For this part of the study, we selected eight countries that we thought could, for the most part, represent the entire world. There were countries from all over the world, from the Americas to Asia to Africa to Europe, but between all eight of them there was still one thing in common: the death rates attributed to air pollution all decreased. Even though not all the mortality rates in these countries decreased the same amount, and in some instances, the mortality rate went up along the way, all eight countries currently have a significantly lower death rate attributed to air pollution than they did in 1990.
Based on this study, it is evident that environmental activism has led to improved air quality across the globe. Mortality rates related to all three major types of air pollution have gone down, and mortality rates related to air pollution in general have decreased in every continent. There's no denying the effectiveness of these efforts to improve the environment, there's only the question of how much farther we can advance to save our planet.
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