According to Osipov, air pollution contributes to around 745 per 100,000 excess deaths in the area each year, a rate comparable to other major health risk factors like smoking and high cholesterol.
Earlier studies on air quality across the Middle East overstated the presence of desert dust, obscuring the contribution to poor air quality from anthropogenic sources.
Such models produce semicorrect answers for the wrong reason, because they poorly represent a significant component of anthropogenic fine particle pollution in the region.
Sergey Osipov, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry
According to Osipov, the scarcity of observation data and a poor representation of emission sources have, “significantly hindered our ability to model the chemical composition of the atmosphere in the region.”
The group, headed by Jos Lelieveld from MPI for Chemistry, gathered measurements made at sea as part of the worldwide collaboration known as Air Quality and climate in the Arabian Basin (AQABA) to address this lack of data. The observations were taken over two months in the summer of 2017, and they covered a range of atmospheric conditions from pristine in the far-off atmosphere to intense pollution and dust storms.
Analysis of the AQABA data provided comprehensive restrictions on the dust size distribution, allowing for a better simulation of dust's mass flux and life cycle. The team was, therefore, able to recreate the chemical composition of the aerosol over the entire size range.
We found that particulate matter from anthropogenic sources accounted for around 53 percent of aerosol visible optical depth and induces a radiative forcing on the climate equivalent to that of the natural dust in the region. Our study highlights how anthropogenic air pollution is a leading health risk and important climactic factor across the Middle East.
Sergey Osipov, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry
Journal Reference
Osipov, S., et al. (2022) Severe atmospheric pollution in the Middle East is attributable to anthropogenic sources. Communications Earth & Environment. doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00514-6.