Air pollution and the health costs of fossil fuels
Organised by "Air Working Group"
This will be the second of a series of webinars we are organising in the autumn on reducing costs from air pollution and strengthening prevention.
Speakers at this webinar will represent the European Respiratory Society, the Global Climate and Health Alliance, the European Environment Agency as well as the Climate Action Network Europe.
The main questions we want to tackle in this webinar are:
What are the health costs of burning fossil fuels?
Cleaner air and stronger climate action: how can fossil fuels phase-out contribute to public health?
Why is fossil gas a false solution for health and the climate?
According to the European Environment Agency (EEA), over 9 in 10 people living in European cities remain exposed to concentrations of particulate matter (PM2.5) above the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline level. The major driver for poor air quality in the EU is the burning of fossil fuels. Yet public subsidies for fossil fuels persist.
Poor air quality, the top environmental risk to health in the EU, leads to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths and hundreds of billions of euros of costs annually. While there is no safe level of air pollution and everyone is vulnerable, the impacts and cost of air pollution are largely preventable.
