Air pollution in Kathmandu off the charts
A sadhu in Kathmandu poses for a chunk of change. Photo by Linda Solomon. Polluted Kathmandu pictured in a photo by Eli Krag.
By 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) deemed it the most polluted city in Asia. It didn't take more than a minute of breathing it to conclude that over time, Kathmandu's air could kill you. A WHO report confirms this.
WHO scientists estimate 537,000 people in Southeast Asia and the Pacific die prematurely each year due to air pollution. The level of PM10 in the air of Kathmandu is 120 microgram per square meter. As per the standard of the World Health Organization, the level of PM10 should be 20 microgram per square meter. The level of PM10 is higher than the official standard in most of the places of Kathmandu valley.
We had known to expect pollution. But the experience exceeded the expectation.
We'd travelled two days, spent sixteen hours total in an airplane and had crossed the dateline, to get here.
We dropped our backpacks onto the floor of the clean, stark room in Schechen Guest House, a hotel run by a monastery.
Eli flopped down on the bed and buried his face in the pillow. "My throat hurts," he said.
"It's the air," I said.
A muffled groan came from the pillow.
Kathmandu in the dark on the way to the hotel from the airport had been hard to evaluate, beyond the obvious: people were poor. Millions. And the air stank and didn't go down easily into the lungs. It was as bad or worse than the air I breathed in New York City right after 9/11. I had fled from post-World Trade Centre attack air, because I couldn't inhale it, and I believed it would do serious damage to my children's health. And people here were much breathing worse, like it was normal. They were stuck in it.
I had certainly HEARD about the pollution in big cities in the developing world. I'd experienced it in the nineties. But between the nineties and now, pollution had taken quantum leaps. I thought of my friends in Canada working so hard to fight climate change. By comparison Canada seemed so pristine. Here was where the real work would need to happen. Cities in the developing world. Cities like Kathmandu.
Photos below by Eli Krag
Cremation fueled with wood at Pashupatinath Temple helps create a smokey Kathmandu
River as garbage dump in Kathmandu
I saw this in rivers and streams throughout the trek, as well, and I wondered what people would be drinking in years to come, as these river garbage dumps grow.
Boy walks along outside of moving bus in Kathmandu traffic
The risks people take with themselves make us look so careful here in Canada. The chaos makes our culture look rigid and laden with rules that ultimately are unnecessary. Or are they?
Female construction workers napping on top of rocks they've been carrying on their backs in Kathmandu
Traffic jam in Kathmandu
Soldiers wearing face masks to protect themselves from air pollution in Kathmandu
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(5) Comments
Great article. Katmandu's air is a toxic mess for people living there. I still have the memory of breathing (tasting!) it a decade later.
However from a climate pollution standpoint, Vancouver is much dirtier.
The trickiest part of climate pollution is that CO2 is invisible, odorless and tasteless. You literally can't have any sensory relationship to it. If you see, smell or taste pollution, then it isn't CO2.
The only way you can tell how much CO2 is being released is by looking at fossil fuel consumption data.
That data shows Nepal releases tiny amounts of climate pollution compared to either Vancouver residents or BC. For example here are some annual CO2 emissions in millions of tonnes:
3 MtCO2 from all 29 million Nepalis
15 MtCO2 from Vancouver area residents
50 MtCO2 in coal shipped out of Vancouver's Westshore Terminals
Nepal even has a climate-cleaner economy than BC. Nepal produces $2,800 per tonne of CO2 released while BC produces around $2,200. Alberta and the oil sands, by the way, produce less than $800.
If you could see and taste climate pollution then your sense of clean Vancouver and dirty Katmandu would be reversed. Freaky but true.
We've done an excellent job in the wealthy world at cleaning up pollution we can see...but at the same time we are failing on an epic scale at cleaning up the stuff we can't see -- like CO2.
A good rule of thumb is that poor people just can't afford enough fossil fuels to have anywhere near the climate impact we do.
Stephen Pacala from Princeton studied the links between climate pollution and wealth. He said: "The 3 billion poorest people…emit essentially nothing. The take-home message here is that you could increase the emissions of all of those people by putting diesel generators or anything you wanted into their lives and it would not materially affect anything I'm going to say… In other words, the development of the desperately poor is not in conflict with solving the climate problem, which is a problem of the very rich. This is very, very important to understand."
"In contrast, the rich are really spectacular emitters. …the top 500 million people [7.5% of humanity] emit half the greenhouse emissions. These people are really rich by global standards. Every single one of them earns more than the average American and they also occur in all the countries of the world. There are Chinese and Americans and Europeans and Japanese and Indians all in this group."
While the poorest half of humanity emits less than 10% of global climate pollution -- and can continue emitting at this level without destabilizing the climate -- they certainly do live in miserable amounts of non-climate pollution.
Air pollution in Nepal is a serious problem. It just isn't a serious climate problem.
It's sad to see so much pollution and waste that's destroying Kathmandu. People need to take notice and try to work on producing a change here.
The masks are to conceal identity and prevent targeted retaliation such as blackmail, reprisals, etc.. Note that those soldiers are equipped with face shields, which indicate civilian duty/riot control. There may be a filter but that would be a bonus beyond the usual reason law enforcement issues masks as part of a uniform.
The link to the WHO report (http://hem.com.np/2006/12/14/kathmandu-most-polluted-city-of-asia-report/) doesn't look very reliable. I am trying to do research on this topic but I can't find any mention of this report anywhere! Please elaborate if you can. Thanks!