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By Ajit Niranjan
Two main risk factors are currently known to raise the chance of dying from the novel coronavirus that has brought the world to a halt: being old and having a weak immune system.
Air pollution makes the second of those more likely.
"If you live in a polluted area, your lungs are compromised like somebody who smokes, so you're more susceptible to the coronavirus," said Kofi Amegah, an epidemiologist and air pollution expert at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana.
Dirty air, which claims more than 7 million lives a year, could make Covid-19 more deadly by contributing to chronic health conditions that leave patients weak in the face of infection.
The European Public Health Alliance said last week that air pollution is likely to cut survival chances from Covid-19.
Research on previous outbreaks has also suggested bad air makes viruses more deadly and spread further. A study of SARS-CoV-1 victims in 2003 found that patients were twice as likely to die in regions where air pollution was high rather than low. Even in regions that were only moderately polluted, the risk of dying was 84% higher.
If a similar dynamic exists for Covid-19, it could add pressure on the critical care units of hospitals in smoggy cities with rapidly rising cases, such as Madrid, London and New York. It could also spell trouble for countries in the global south where most people burn wood, dung, kerosene or coal indoors to cook and heat their homes.
Silent killer
In northern Italy and the Chinese city of Wuhan, home to high levels of pollution and some of the most severe outbreaks to date, preliminary data suggests that particulate matter may already have played a role in overwhelming health care systems.
PM2.5 — particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter, less than the width of a human hair — can penetrate the lung barrier and enter the bloodstream, raising the risk of developing heart and lung disease.
The case fatality rate in China was nine times higher for people with cardiovascular disease and six times higher for patients with diabetes, hypertension and respiratory disease than it was for people without underlying health conditions, a joint study by the World Health Organization and China found in February.
In Italy, health officials reported in March that 99% of a sample of patients who died from Covid-19 had an underlying illness — with almost half the deceased having suffered from three or more — though the sample was not drawn randomly and may not represent the population. The most common ailments were high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes.
The WHO says the pandemic is too recent to draw a link between air pollution and the deadliness of Covid-19, but this shouldn't stop countries from acting.
"Whether or not we have this correlation between Covid-19 and air pollution, we need to reduce air pollution no matter what," Maria Neira, director of public and environmental health at the World Health Organization, told DW.
"Stop smoking and reduce the levels of air pollution — that is a recommendation we can make even without having more evidence."
Together with ozone pollution, PM2.5 particles shave almost three years off our lives, a study in the journal Cardiovascular Research found last month. The global loss of life from outdoor air pollution is 10 times greater than that of all forms of violence put together.
Moreover, about nine in 10 premature deaths caused by air pollution — including toxic gases NO2 and SO2 — hit people in low and middle-income countries. Even within rich cities in Europe and North America, working class, black and ethnic minority communities tend to breathe the dirtiest air.
Across sub-Saharan Africa, women are particularly exposed to pollutants from indoor cooking.
"For these women, their lung systems are compromised," said Amegah from Ghana's University of Cape Coast, adding that if Covid-19 spreads they will be especially vulnerable.
"We pray and keep our fingers crossed we don't see the levels [we're seeing] in northern Italy and China."
Disease spread
As well as weakening the body, airborne pollutants could even act as a carrier of the new coronavirus and allow it to survive in the air attached to particulates, a team of Italian researchers suggested in March.
High concentrations of particulate matter in parts of northern Italy in February may have "boosted" the spread of the epidemic this way, according to a position paper published by the Italian Society of Environmental Medicine that has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Other scientists have cast doubt on this, pointing out that there are no reported cases of this coronavirus spreading in the air and that people are the main vector of transmission.
"It's good to reduce air pollution to promote health, even to help decrease preconditions that could aggravate coronavirus, such as asthma, but I cannot see [air pollution] as an important contribution to the discussion about containment of the virus," said Jos Lelieveld, director of atmospheric chemistry at the Max Planck Institute and lead author of the study on deaths from air pollution.
As coronavirus cases rise exponentially around the world, lockdowns to stop its spread have reduced pollution levels.
earthobservatory/nasa.gov
Satellite images of China and Italy show striking drops in NO2, a toxic gas that inflames the airways, as governments closed factories and kept cars off the streets. The drop in air pollution in China may even have saved more lives than were lost from Covid-19, a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed suggested on Friday, though this comparison does not factor in the lives that would have been lost had the coronavirus spread unchecked.
Not all of the fall in air pollution seen from space can be attributed to lockdowns, either. Air pollution is higher in colder months anyway because people heat more and drive cars more often, so it tends to fall around this time of year, said Christian Retscher of the European Space Agency.
"Certainly, we see an effect of the coronavirus on NO2 … We see an additional effect [but] we don't know the precise number."
While lockdowns have helped clean the air, it is also uncertain how long they will keep pollution levels down.
"Once the crisis is over, and we see this in China, there's a temptation to compensate for the weeks and months lost," said Zoltan Massay-Kosubek, a policy expert for clean air and sustainable transport at the European Public Health Alliance.
Nonetheless, this shows that air pollution can be reduced and lives saved, said the WHO's Neira. "Now we need to maintain that — not the fact that we'll be confined, but reducing the air pollution levels outside."
Reposted with permission from DW.
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By David Konisky
On his first day in office President Joe Biden started signing executive orders to reverse Trump administration policies. One sweeping directive calls for stronger action to protect public health and the environment and hold polluters accountable, including those who "disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities."
Michael S. Regan, President Biden's nominee to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, grew up near a coal-burning power plant in North Carolina and has pledged to "enact an environmental justice framework that empowers people in all communities." NCDEQ
By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
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By Jewel Fraser
Noreen Nunez lives in a middle-class neighborhood that rises up a hillside in Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region.