Air pollution kills more people than Malaria Aids and TB combined, yet it receives just 1% of the aid budget.
Alarmingly, last year, rich countries gave 20% more to fossil fuel projects than to programmes to cut the air pollution they cause. Dirty air, is responsible for roughly 4 million deaths a year.
If comparing the number of years of life lost to each cause of death, HIV receives 34 times as much funding, and. Africa and Latin America have 500,000 deaths a year from air pollution, yet they receive 5% and 10% of the funding respectively.
Now it is true that greening the economies of the world may in the future, eliminate many of these deaths, but we also give more money to fossil fuel projects than we do to green power that might replace it – this is despite the fact that the green project is often cheaper to build and to run and doesnt have the negatives on local people that come with burning things.