Study highlights car pollution
A report on the health effects of air pollution shows a focus by government on reducing emissions will save lives.
The latest Health and Air Pollution in New Zealand (HAPINZ) study shows emissions contribute to the premature deaths of more than 3,300 Kiwis every year and to about 13,000 cases of childhood asthma.
Phil Twyford, Associate Environment Minister, says: “This report provides a snapshot of the decade of decline before our government was elected, and underscores the importance of the environmental progress we have made for the health and well-being of New Zealanders.”
Motor vehicles and domestic fires cause 96 per cent of the social costs from air pollution, or about $15.6 billion a year, “further underlining the importance of New Zealand’s first emissions reduction plan released earlier this year, which drives down emissions across all sectors”.
Twyford, pictured, adds: “It provides further evidence of why we need policies like the clean car discount, which has just recently seen a record amount of electric vehicles and hybrids registered in its first year, state-sector decarbonisation projects like getting rid of coal boilers in schools, and reform of the resource management system, which will require prescribed limits on air pollution.
“We have also made half-price public transport permanent for many New Zealanders.
“We’ve made big strides in improving our environment since 2017, including banning single-use plastic bags, and ending new offshore oil and gas exploration. But there is always more to do. This report demonstrates the urgency in continuing this work.”
The HAPINZ 3.0 report was funded by Waka Kotahi and the environment, transport, and health ministries. Click here to access it online.
Some technical stuff
The HAPINZ 3.0 report states that dominant sources for anthropogenic social costs, that’s to say those originating from human activity, depend on the pollutant.
Domestic fires used for home heating in winter dominate New Zealand’s anthropogenic PM2.5 pollution costs at 74 per cent. That’s followed by motor vehicles on 17 per cent, with contributions from windblown dust coming in at eight per cent.
PM2.5 is an air pollutant that is a concern for people’s health when its levels are high. PM2.5 – or particulate matter – are tiny particles that reduce visibility and cause the air to appear hazy when levels are elevated.
Motor vehicles dominate, exclusively, anthropogenic nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution costs at 100 per cent.
Other anthropogenic sources will contribute to NO2 exposure but due to limited information, the HAPINZ report has been defaulted to assigning all effects of NO2 to only on-road vehicles.
Nonetheless, it is considered this is “reasonable given motor vehicles are likely to be responsible for nearly 90 per cent of all NO2 exposure in urban areas”.
The combined social costs associated with PM2.5 and NO2 anthropogenic air pollution are dominated by motor vehicles on 67 per cent. Next up are domestic fires on 29 per cent, windblown dust with three per cent and the balance from industry.
“The contribution of motor vehicles to overall anthropogenic air-pollution health impacts in HAPINZ 3.0 is considerably greater than that reported in HAPINZ 2.0, [published in 2012],” the report says.
“This is because HAPINZ 2.0 used PM10 as a proxy for all air pollution and assigned effects to individual sources based on their estimated contribution to PM10 concentrations, which are generally dominated by domestic fires.
“Motor vehicles are the dominant source of NO2 in urban areas, but this was not factored into the HAPINZ 2.0 source allocations because the NO2 impacts were not expected to be so significant.”
