In Africa, as everywhere else, breathing kills. But more than anywhere else in the world, the extent of the health damage directly attributable to the chemical degradation of the air remains largely underestimated on the continent. And yet, the first figures available are chilling: thousands of premature deaths per year and billions of dollars in associated health costs in Nigeria alone.
And this is probably only the tip of the iceberg, given that fewer than a dozen African countries currently have standardized air quality monitoring systems! Between the opacity of public and industrial players on the subject, and a chronic lack of reliable data, a dark veil still hangs over the real intensity of this modern scourge in full African explosion.
Paradoxically, the rapid development of African economies comes at the price of increasingly deadly air pollution. With galloping urbanization, explosive car ownership and booming extractive industries, all the ingredients are in place to import the worst of the Western carbon-based growth model to the continent. At the expense of the lungs of Africa’s most modest urban dwellers, who are the first to be affected.
So it’s urgent to pull back the veil on this silent killer, to provoke a political response commensurate with the health challenge. Measuring and scientifically documenting the phenomenon, forcing the main private and public emitters to be transparent about their emissions, and fully integrating environmental health into urban development programs : the solutions exist to quickly emerge from this opaque smog. That’s if we put an end to the general laissez-faire attitude and take the offensive against air pollution at the highest level of government, the evil of the century that is already ravaging African cities…
The silent degradation of African air
Long spared the air pollution peaks experienced in Europe, North America and Asia, the African continent is no longer immune to global air contamination. Under the impact of industrial take-off and the ongoing urban explosion, pollutant concentrations have risen sharply locally over the past thirty years. This steady rise in emissions is further amplified by polluted air masses from neighboring industrial powers… And a phenomenon largely under-documented by the endemic weakness of the continent’s environmental monitoring systems. In short, it’s by stealth and almost by surprise that African air is rapidly deteriorating!
An increasingly heavy local contribution…
Unlike the emerging powers of Asia, the African continent is still a small contributor to global emissions of the gases and particulate pollutants responsible for climate change and the deterioration of ecosystem health. Its responsibility for global climate disruption remains marginal in comparison with old industrialized nations such as the United States and new world factories such as China and India.
Nevertheless, over the past thirty years, the rate of increase in concentrations of primary air pollutants on the continent has been one of the highest in the world. And even if average levels remain below the peaks seen in East Asia, the rapid upward trend is there, driven by the unbridled development of African megacities.
In fact, the urban boom associated with the galloping motorization of the middle classes is mechanically concentrating the traditional sources of pollution in the airsheds of major centers: road transport, energy production, manufacturing industry, waste incineration… As a result, West African environmental observatories are measuring record levels of NO2 pollution, the main tracer of exhaust fumes, in all the region’s capital cities. Ghana, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon are even regularly singled out for their recurrent peaks and their laissez-faire attitude to the issue…
But the phenomenon goes far beyond the dynamic coastal megacities. Everywhere on the continent, mining and steel-making conurbations included, the location of booming extractive and manufacturing activities also comes at a high price in terms of atmospheric quality. The industrial enclaves of Port Harcourt in Nigeria and the Copper Corridor in Zambia, for example, are the focus of concern, with local communities suffering chronic pollution from fine particles and heavy metals.
All in all, according to the World Health Organization a Bank “People living in the African Region are disproportionately exposed to the burden of outdoor air pollution. In 2019, the African Region recorded around 338,000 deaths attributable to ambient air pollution (64 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants), 46% of which were women“. And that’s just the beginning: with less than a third of Africans today urban dwellers, compared with 65% by 2060, the atmospheric bill for the continent’s economic and demographic catch-up could quickly soar…
amplified by air masses imported from Asia
But the continent is not only suffering from its own rapidly increasing domestic pollution : it is also directly impacted by persistent smog from the planet’s most industrialized neighboring regions. An atmospheric double whammy!
Indeed, air masses circulating over long distances from the main emission hubs of East Asia, the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, Europe, all end up stagnating sooner or later and dumping part of their load of pollutants on the African continent.
The Indian monsoon, with its violent seasonal winds, transports East Asian pollution to the east coast of Africa and the Indian Ocean in less than a week. These dirty air masses, laden with soot, methane and SO2, stagnate directly and add to the famous brown cloud, the veil of brown atmospheric pollution that now crushes East Africa for several months of the year.
In the north of the continent, the phenomenon is further amplified by the proximity of the atmospheric vortex of the Middle East and Maghreb, itself saturated by massive discharges from the petrochemical industry. Here too, the regular arrival of external pollution clouds, carried by prevailing winds, is sadly superimposed on an already sustained local production of particles linked to mining and road transport. An explosive cocktail for Egyptian, Algerian or even Nigerian skies, which are now often whitish…
In short, geography and regional meteorological dynamics are such that the continent seems condemned to endure a degree of local pollution over which it has little control. The result is a widespread feeling of powerlessness, even fatality, among public opinion and decision-makers, in the face of a phenomenon perceived as inescapable and… uncontrollable.
Poor environmental monitoring
The final factor contributing to the abnormal “invisibility” of air degradation in Africa is the patent inadequacy of public and private systems for monitoring air quality. Despite a burgeoning awareness on the part of city-dwellers and recurring alerts from NGOs, the continent suffers from a chronic lack of consolidated data to objectively assess the reality of local air pollution and its health impacts.
Today, only a handful of countries have truly operational networks for continuous monitoring of their urban ambient air. Egypt, with its national observation program, Ghana, with its 5 automatic stations deployed since 2010, and South Africa are the continent’s best performers in this field. At the very least, they provide reliable time series on particulate concentrations in certain major cities, even if the pollutants monitored remain fragmented.
As for the rest, most countries simply don’t have any public infrastructure for monitoring their atmosphere! Or even old stations inherited from colonial times, which have fallen into disrepair and operate erratically due to a lack of maintenance budgets. In short, a culpable statistical blind spot when you consider the health stakes involved… All the more reason for public inaction on this issue, when the situation is steadily deteriorating!
Fortunately, thanks to recent technological advances, the private sector is also beginning to take hold of this niche. Cleantech start-ups such as the Nigerian network AirQo and the Kenyan company Respiri are deploying their own air micro-sensors all over the place to map pollution black spots in real time on a very fine scale. This crowdsourcing of air quality could, in time, be a useful replacement for failing public networks across the continent. Here’s hoping for collective awareness and public policies that rise to the challenge…
Major health impacts
Over and above the diffuse, long-term effects on ecosystems, the degradation of the air breathed by Africans is beginning to pose major, well-documented health threats. Between the explosion in respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, the loss of physical capacity and the rise in premature mortality, the scientific evidence is already irrefutable, despite the patchy statistics. And in the absence of ambitious public policies, the human bill looks set to be particularly high on a continent with a still-fragile epidemiological profile…
Fine particles and NO2, silent killers
Which atmospheric pollutants are the focus of growing concern in Africa? Without a doubt, fine particles (PM2.5 and PM10), mainly generated by the combustion of fossil fuels and biomass (traditional stoves). Invisible to the naked eye when they remain suspended in the ambient air, these dusts are formidable chronic health vectors because of their ability to infiltrate deep into the pulmonary tract each time they are inhaled. According to a recent report: “In sub-Saharan Africa, where over 80% of the population cooks with solid fuels, domestic air pollution has the greatest impact on life expectancy, being responsible for a drop of one year and four months out of a total loss of almost two years’ life expectancy“.
Associated with devastating respiratory and cardiovascular conditions such as asthma, chronic bronchitis and lung cancer, fine particles in outdoor air alone are already responsible for several hundred thousand premature deaths across the continent. But their impact on public health remains largely underestimated compared to other, more high-profile environmental stressors such as malaria.
Other major pollutants singled out on the continent are nitrogen oxides (NOx). Emitted during high-temperature combustion processes, notably in transport and power plants, these irritating gases directly weaken the respiratory systems of those exposed.
Also of note is the gradual rise in pollen and other airborne biological allergens, which are proliferating as a result of global warming and agricultural/industrial pollution. Here again, data are lacking, but in Senegal, Ghana and South Africa, the first epidemiological studies are already quantifying the correlative explosion in cases of allergic rhinitis and eczema among the under-15s…
Hundreds of thousands of premature deaths
In the absence of advanced environmental monitoring systems coupled with large-scale epidemiological surveys, it is difficult to accurately estimate the health impact of the gradual deterioration of air quality in Africa. Nevertheless, by extrapolating from the first limited local studies, the WHO recently attempted an impressive estimate of the impact of air pollution alone.
Verdict: 338,000 deaths recorded in 2019, showing unfortunately upward trends, directly attributable to fine particles across the continent, mainly in large cities. That’s over 2% of total annual mortality in Africa, far behind AIDS, but now higher than malaria in terms of lives lost…
The prize goes unsurprisingly to the most industrialized and urbanized countries. Nigeria, with its population of 180 million, already had over 46,000 deaths in 2012, and the figures are still rising! That’s a little less than the 94,000 official annual victims… of the civil war between 1967 and 1970. For its part, North Africa, with its large coastal conurbations, is already paying a heavy respiratory price for the intensification of its industrial sector, with a percentage that has nothing to envy other parts of the continent.
Above all, in relation to its population, Central Africa has the highest ratio of premature mortality induced by fine particles (around 141 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants). This is due to unbridled, unregulated urbanization and uncontrolled, exploding automobile traffic in hilly cities such as Yaoundé, Douala and, to a lesser extent, Kinshasa…
Exorbitant future health costs
In addition to the death toll, the bill is already looking high for Africa’s notoriously underfunded healthcare systems. A recent World Bank study, on The Cost of Air Pollution in Lagos, estimates that illnesses and premature deaths due to ambient air pollution caused losses of $2.1 billion in 2018, or around 2.1% of Lagos State’s GDP !
And here again, this is probably just the tip of the health and economic iceberg, as the environmental causes of many pathologies are still under-documented in Africa. What is the real number of hospitalizations linked to asthma in explosions ? How many working days are lost due to bronchitis? And what is the loss of earnings when children’s physical potential is diminished by chemical pollution from an early age?
These are all major questions that medical and economic research on the continent is only just beginning to address. But the first trends observed already point to the worrying prospect of saturation of healthcare systems and an explosion in associated costs as a result of emerging environmental risk factors such as air, water and soil pollution…
In short, with average urban concentrations of fine particles already exceeding WHO recommendations in half of the African megacities observed, there is no doubt that the human and financial bill will rise dangerously in the absence of strong prevention policies. And this in countries whose public finances are already under extreme pressure… Can the continent afford to turn a blind eye to this new health scourge for much longer?
Targeting policies on those responsible
Faced with a worrying explosion in health indicators, a legitimate reflex is gradually emerging : track down the sources of pollution to better target public action. Transport, industry, waste : each sector is more or less directly responsible for the asphyxiation of African cities, as highlighted by incipient scientific research.
But these preliminary studies also show that not all territories are equal when it comes to emissions. From vulnerable rural areas to sprawling megacities, albeit for different reasons, the social geography of exposure is complex… and calls for political responses that are themselves differentiated.
Motorized mobility in the dock
Unsurprisingly, in view of international studies on the subject, the transport sector is also the main culprit in emissions of atmospheric pollutants in Africa, far ahead of industry, energy and even waste and biomass burning.
With individual car fleets exploding in tandem with the motorization of the urban middle classes, many old diesel buses and trucks spewing soot, and air traffic booming as a result of globalization, it’s hard for the carbon-based mobility sector to escape the indisputable verdict of climate and health experts.
In Nigeria, for example, a recent British scientific study accuses the sector of being responsible for a large part of the urban smog that is devastating public health! The same is true in South Africa, where the CSIR estimates that the direct contribution of exhausts to the deadly peaks of fine particles in the skies over major cities such as Johannesburg and Pretoria is constantly fluctuating.
The same is true in Morocco, where the preponderance of obsolete diesel engines in the vehicle fleet directly causes annual NO2 emissions to soar between 6% and 9.9%.
In short, the scientific reports produced in recent years are unanimous on the major role played by the African car boom, which needs to be urgently tackled from a health point of view.
Industry and waste : aggravating factors
However, motorized transport is not everything. Other diffuse sources of air pollution contribute significantly, albeit more indirectly, to the overall degradation of the ambient air breathed by African city-dwellers.
First and foremost, the manufacturing sector. Admittedly, with an industry that is still in its infancy on a global scale, limited to a few extractive industries or the primary processing of wood/cotton/sugar cane, Africa has not yet entered the era of mass production that was so polluting in Europe or China. But already, around certain emerging industrial basins or mining corridors, the impact on the air is being felt locally.
A case in point is the urban-industrial corridor of the Zambian Copperbelt. In the midst of a boom in copper and cobalt mining for electric batteries, this mining region is seeing a surge in hospital admissions for respiratory and dermatological disorders among the population, without any official recognition of industrial pollution by the public authorities…
Another factor that is sometimes underestimated is the uncontrolled or inefficient incineration of household waste, which is increasingly ubiquitous in the continent’s major cities. A widespread scourge with nauseating fumes that, according to a recent Benin study, contribute to the overall deterioration in air quality, particularly at night in disadvantaged neighborhoods…
In short, cleaner transport policies and low-emission urban planning alone will not exhaust the fight for breathable air in cities, as long as the industrial sector and waste management remain free of excessive constraints in Africa!
Between town and country: air discrimination
But beyond the sectors of activity alone, inequalities in exposure to air pollution also present strong geographical and social disparities across the continent, which need to be better understood.
Of course, intuitively, it is above all the large, sprawling metropolises plagued by congestion and traffic jams that focus media and health attention. And rightly so: research into the fine spatialization of pollutant concentrations measures levels rarely reached in other parts of the world. Along the saturated highways of Dakar, Addis Ababa or Johannesburg, for example, some studies have found seasonal peaks in fine particle pollution well above international health ceilings!
However, this urban spotlight should not overshadow the worrying situation in Africa’s rural areas, which are reputed to be unspoiled. Here, too, the degradation of ambient air is well and truly underway. The pollutants involved may be different and more diffuse, but their long-term effects are just as devastating.
At issue here is the widespread use of open agricultural fires, which has accelerated in recent years, contributing to the veil of smoke visible over vast rural areas of the continent during the dry season. Admittedly, this is an azonal and temporary phenomenon. But the frequency and intensity of the episodes are already enough, according to some studies, to impact the health of local residents and exposed workers, who inhale cocktails of volatile organic compounds and metallic pesticide residues…
In short, these two schematic photographs of polluted cities and intoxicated countryside reveal two parallel challenges for African clean air policies. Although the challenges are different, they must be reconciled without the slightest opposition if this new health risk is to be truly contained at source across the continent. At the summit and at the grassroots!
Towards collective awareness?
While denial still prevailed until recently in the face of the silent killer that is air pollution, the lines are finally starting to move in Africa. Driven by an increasingly mobilized civil society, despite the persistent opacity of public information, demands are mounting for the authorities to take the issue seriously. On the agenda : integrating environmental health into health and budgetary policies, making industrial polluters accountable, and raising public awareness of key eco-actions…
Civil society awakens from its torpor
While air pollution has long been a blind spot for public policy and public opinion on the continent, the lines have been moving timidly in recent years, thanks to African environmental NGOs increasingly speaking out on the subject. Organized into groups such as the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and the Alliance pour l’Air Pur en Afrique, they have succeeded in putting the issue at the top of the technical, if not the political, agenda.
In Senegal, it was the religious dynamic for the Safeguarding of the Environment and Health between 2018 and 2019 that finally got the public authorities to react. Ditto in Ivory Coast, where joint pressure from RIEL and IREN prompted the authorities to launch their first air quality measurement campaign.
On a continental scale, the combined lobbying of groups such as Jeunes Volontaires pour l’Environnement and Rebel Base Africa at the African Union also led to the symbolic officialization of an “African Clean Air Day“, now celebrated every year on September 7…
In short, the grafting of an ecological conscience onto the continent’s intensive development trajectories seems to be gradually taking hold via these dynamic and interconnected associative relays. But there’s still a long way to go before a genuine cultural revolution in African urban societies on these health issues…
Public and private players still missing in action
For the time being, despite the emergence of this emerging social demand, the main economic players pointing the finger are still conspicuous by their passivity or even culpable opacity on the issue of air quality in Africa.
The recent scandals stirred up by whistle-blowers concerning the fraudulent emissions concealers installed on old diesel buses in Kenya, or the illegal exemptions granted to the most polluting cement manufacturers in Morocco, illustrate this prevailing climate of complacency. In the name of the sacrosanct principle of short-term growth, public policies are still reluctant to put the squeeze on known industrial underachievers.
In the private sector too, good environmental practice hardly seems to be a priority in the African economic boom. Between the opacity of impact assessments when they exist, manifest under-declarations of actual toxic discharges, and blockages to the publication of internal monitoring data: the major foreign industrial and extractive groups all too often respond to questioning with contempt and denial on this new societal front.
But local public authorities, the constitutional guarantors of citizens’ health, are just as much singled out in this murky game. How many African capitals are still officially unable to indicate the number of days they exceed permissible fine-particle thresholds each year? More generally, official reports are still sorely lacking to objectively assess the general state of Africa’s skies…
Towards dedicated public policies
So, how do we get out of this toxic fog of information, which is still mortgaging any response commensurate with the health issues at stake? A number of NGOs are now calling for the rapid institutionalization of environmental authorities that are truly independent of private interests, on the model of the American Agencies. And equipped with credible, standardized means of coercion to track down recalcitrant fraudsters. This is the only way to guarantee data transparency and accountability of the main public and private emitters, a sine qua non condition for any large-scale corrective action on polluting mobility, industry and energy.
Above all, health campaigners are calling for each state to draw up national roadmaps dedicated to reclaiming clean air. These would include a battery of sector-specific measures based on quantitative emission reduction targets with clear timetables: phasing out sulphur-containing fuels, widespread use of particulate filters, Euro 7 and then Euro 8 standards, low-emission zones, scrappage bonuses for old vehicles… These are all instruments that have been tried and tested in other parts of the world, and which need to be adapted and rolled out as a matter of urgency to the continent’s major cities and regions. And to release national and international funding at least commensurate with the $2.1 billion, if not more, in annual economic damage caused to Nigeria alone…
While technical solutions abound, the main obstacle today remains cultural and political: will we FINALLY be able to make the reclamation of clean air THE environmental priority of tomorrow’s African development? The health of over 1.2 billion city-dwellers depends on it!
Action at every level
Beyond the local level, the global strategy to combat the asphyxiation of Africa’s cities and countryside must also rely on regional and international leverage. Because pollutant flows will always ignore administrative borders. As for developed countries, their historical responsibility for climate change makes them natural allies in financing this health battle for clean air.
Decarbonizing transport and energy at municipal level
Reclaiming clean air begins with emergency measures at the level of large conurbations, the linchpins of national economies. With 2 out of 3 inhabitants now living in urban areas, it is mayors who are strategically placed to rapidly curb local sources of emissions in traffic or buildings, and thus reap rapid health benefits on a large scale.
Hence the unstoppable logic of the C40 approach, this global network of major cities committed hand in hand to decarbonizing their transport systems. In Africa, Lagos, Cape Town, Nairobi and Dakar have already joined the network to pool their efforts and multiply urban ecological innovations at home : electric buses, secure bicycle networks, urban tolls, park-and-ride facilities with autonomous shuttles…
On the energy front, another decentralized lever for action is also essential : as quickly as possible, generalize the greening of municipal energy mixes, still largely dominated by fairly dirty carbon (fuel oil, coal) apart from a few hydroelectric exceptions. Here too, proven solutions abound, provided the local political will exists: rooftop solar thermal and photovoltaic systems, intelligent micro-wind turbines, ground-mounted solar panels on former landfill sites, small-scale household waste methanization units…
Thanks to these decentralized installations, several metropolises are already leading the way: Kampala wants to achieve 61% clean energy by 2030, Kigali 80% and Cape Town is hoping for 100% by 2050 ! Although these are still isolated municipal programs on this scale of ambition, they offer hope of a possible change of era, provided that green financing is massively increased.
Coordinating action across regional borders
Physical and political borders between states are porous, and with them the air masses that carry local pollution, but also that of neighboring countries. Hence the second imperative if we are to give substance to integrated air policies on a relevant geographical scale: regional cooperation.
On the scale of major air basins and prevailing wind flows that stir up emissions over thousands of kilometers, the challenge is to coordinate in order to mitigate the tendency of polluting sources to relocate outside national borders. Typically, these famous “dirty industries” are tempted to take advantage of overly lax environmental legislation in neighboring countries in order to free themselves from local ecological constraints…
This is the whole point of the historic treaties on cross-border pollution… which should now be extended to cover air health issues between neighbouring states in Africa. Regulatory convergence, harmonized carbon taxation, shared air quality observatories: there are many ways in which we can work together to better prevent these leaks.
The relevant scale may vary according to climatic continents and demographic dynamics: the Congo Basin, the East African Community, ECOWAS in West Africa, the Maghreb with Southern Europe… When will we see Regional World Air Organizations?
North-South carbon offsetting
The third, more innovative dimension to be activated is international solidarity and carbon offsetting towards African nations, in the name of the famous climate debt accumulated by the rich countries of the North. This “polluter pays” principle, still too little applied in practice, would find an ideal philanthropic demonstration ground in the financing of environmental health policies in Africa.
In concrete terms, what amounts are we talking about ? Potentially astronomical sums, compared to the staggering cumulative economic and health damage that inaction would cost the continent. In Nigeria alone, the bill already exceeds 2.1 billion dollars a year !
But formulated in this way, such a North-South climate solidarity effort to finance African clean air policies is probably beyond the short-term political reach of rich countries’ budgets. An alternative approach could be to use carbon quotas : each tonne of CO2 avoided in Africa through local clean air policies would enable European countries to purchase additional carbon credits at low cost to help them meet their climate targets. A form of virtuous equalization to be built, where everyone would benefit from a more virtuous, more breathable circle!
Overcoming fatalism through action at every level
At the end of this plunge into a blind spot in African development, the facts are clear: the continent is suffocating, slowly but surely. And if nothing is done to curb the self-perpetuating spiral of emissions, in 30 years’ time African cities could be unbearable open-air pollution sinks for hundreds of millions of city-dwellers. The new urban hell in the age of the Anthropocene?
And yet, beyond the hype, knowledge and technical solutions abound to limit the continent’s predicted decline in health. But they are still largely under-exploited, due to a lack of political ambition and financial commitment commensurate with the challenge, in countries that are often resigned to the inevitability of industrialization.
It is this fatalism that we must combat at all costs, through coordinated and voluntary action at all levels, to offer a breathable future to Africa’s new generations. It’s up to local authorities to step up their efforts to regulate polluting industries by introducing clean transport with strict standards. Neighboring states to cooperate to stem leakage across porous borders. And finally, it’s up to the international community to generously contribute to this effort in the name of climate duty…
Yes, it promises to be an immense struggle to reverse decades of neglect and entrenched economic trajectories. But an exceptional situation calls for an exceptional response to break the deadly cycle. So, when will an African IPCC on air quality sound the alarm? Unless civil society forces the issue before the asphyxiation ultimatum… The history of clean air on the continent has yet to be written.
