📔Foreword

Have you ever sat watching colours swirl around a soap bubble? Red here, orange there; yellow on one side, blue on the other; every imaginable colour refracted into your eye. Air pollution is a monochrome – indeed, sometimes barely visible – version of that soap film, trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere, swirling around the surface of our world. The wind blows it from here to there, shifting its thickness, bouncing and bending it into our lungs and causing a whole spectrum of impacts on humans and the planet. Just as the colours change from one part of a soap bubble to another, so Earth’s air pollution varies from one country and continent to another, from day to day, sometimes even from one minute to the next.

Collectively, the air we prize – the breath of life that keeps us alive – is positively toxic. It’s killing more people prematurely than almost anything else on the planet: the equivalent of 7–10 million each year, which is five times more than road accidents, three times more than tobacco smoke, fifteen times more than all wars and violence and more than malaria and Aids combined. That’s 2,500 times as many people as died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, every single year. The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) coronavirus that swept the world in 2020 was initially predicted to kill about 20 million – but in the noise and the panic, we forget that air pollution kills five times that many every decade. Polluted air is now heavily implicated in six of the world’s top ten causes of death; not just obvious lung and breathing problems, but heart disease, cancers, stroke and dementia. These bald statistics mask a vast human cost. Any of the world’s millions of air pollution deaths could follow years of chronic suffering: if dirty air is going to kill you, medical research suggests it will make your life smoulder for a decade before it snuffs the wick out for good

Chris Woodfork- Breathless: Why Air Pollution Matters and How it affects you.