Difficulty: Challenger (Level 2)
Nearly 2,000 children die every day from health problems linked to air pollution, a report said last month.
The findings came from the State of Global Air report from the Health Effects Institute in the United States. It revealed that exposure to air pollution contributed to the deaths of 8.1 million people in 2021.
Young children are especially affected by air pollution. It has been linked to the deaths of more than 700,000 children under the age of five.
More than 500,000 of those deaths were due to cooking indoors using dirty fuels. These include coal, wood and dung. This happens mostly in Africa and Asia. Children there spend a lot of time near the stove with their mothers.
More than two billion people cook on simple stoves or open fires inside their homes and breathe in dangerous smoke. Most of these people are poor.
There are ways to reduce the use of dirty solid fuels for cooking inside homes, according to Pallavi Pant, the head of global health at the Health Effects Institute. (see graphic)
Many people can now use cleaner stoves. This has helped a lot. The number of young children dying from problems linked to air pollution has dropped by 50 per cent since 2000.
The International Energy Agency has said that governments and businesses will give US$2.2 billion to help people get safer ways to cook.
