Energy, the environment and health

CHAPTER 3

energy, the environment, and health
John P. Holdren (United States) Kirk R. Smith (United States)
LEAD AUTHORS: Tord Kjellstrom (New Zealand), David Streets (United States), and Xiaodong Wang (China) CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS: Susan Fischer (United States), Donna Green (Australia), Emi Nagata (Japan), and Jennifer Slotnick (United States) MAJOR REVIEWERS: Jyoti Parikh (India) andYasmin Von Schirnding (South Africa)

ABSTRACT mental and health impacts of energy
are discussed according to the scale at which they occur. About half of the world’s households use solid fuels (biomass and coal) for cooking and heating in simple devices that produce large amounts of air pollution—pollution that is probably responsible for 4–5 percent of the global burden of disease. The chiefecosystem impacts relate to charcoal production and fuelwood harvesting. At the workplace scale, solid-fuel fuel cycles create significant risks for workers and have the largest impacts on populations among energy systems. In communities, fuel use is the main cause of urban air pollution, though there is substantial variation among cities in the relative contributions of vehicles and stationarysources. Diesel-fuelled vehicles, which are more prominent in developing countries, pose a growing challenge for urban health. The chief ecosystem impacts result from large-scale hydropower projects in forests, although surface mining causes significant damage in some areas. At the regional scale, fine particles and ozone are the most widespread healthdamaging pollutants from energy use, and canextend hundreds of kilometres from their sources. Similarly, nitrogen and sulphur emissions lead to acid deposition far from their sources. Such deposition is associated with damage to forests, soils, and lakes in various parts of the world. At the global scale, energy systems account for two-thirds of human-generated greenhouse gas increases. Thus energy use is the human activity most closely linkedto potential climate change. Climate change is feared to have significant direct impacts on human health and on ecosystems. There are important opportunities for ‘no regrets’ strategies that achieve benefits at more than one scale. For example, if greenhouse gas controls are targeted to reduce solid fuel use in households and other energy systems with large health impacts (such as vehiclefleets), significant improvements can occur at the local, community, regional, and global scales. s

In this chapter, the principal environ-

62

WORLD ENERGY ASSESSMENT: ENERGY AND THE CHALLENGE OF SUSTAINABILIT Y

Chapter 3: Energy, the Environment, and Health

he harvesting, processing, distribution, and use of fuels and other sources of energy have major environmental implications.Insults include major land-use changes due to fuel cycles such as coal, biomass, and hydropower, which have implications for the natural as well as human environment.1 Perhaps the most important insult from energy systems is the routine and accidental release of pollutants. Human activities disperse a wide variety of biologically and climatologically active elements and compounds into the atmosphere,surface waters, and soil at rates far beyond the natural flows of these substances. The results of these alterations include a 10-fold increase in the acidity of rain and snow over millions of square kilometres and significant changes in the global composition of the stratosphere (upper atmosphere) and troposphere (lower atmosphere). The rough proportions of various pollutants released into theenvironment by human activities are shown in table 3.1. Note the importance of energy supply systems, both industrial and traditional, in the mobilisation of such toxic substances as sulphur oxides and particles as well as in the release of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas. Also shown is the human disruption index for each substance, which is the ratio of the amount released by human...