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All we want is to be able to breathe cleaner air

Just when activists were at their wits' end trying to convince the government of the need to show more urgency on air pollution, there is a new argument. It is one we can all understand. Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have correlated loss of visibility with air pollution and rates of death from natural causes. They found that for every kilometre of reduced visibility, an additional 70 deaths occurred every year.

For every 6.5km of visibility lost, natural deaths rose by 1.13 per cent a day and deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory disease rose by 1.31 and 1.92 per cent respectively. To put that in a wider perspective, the researchers say that over the past four years average visibility in the city was 12.6 km, less than half the norm of 30km from a 50-metre structure, and well under the average of 20km in Vancouver, Paris, London and Berlin. This would account for 1,200 additional deaths annually or three avoidable deaths a day. Sceptics might challenge such a simple premise. But chief researcher Professor Anthony Hedley says visibility is strongly correlated with particulate and nitrogen dioxide pollution, and therefore with increased mortality risks.

If reduced visibility translates to a health risk fatal to some people, that adds urgency to the need to replace our ridiculously outdated air-quality objectives with targets that better reflect international standards than those proposed by the government. For example, the World Health Organisation sets the minimum safety level for particulates at 20 micrograms, while Hong Kong sets it at 55. On one day last week, with visibility in the city down to 5km, there were 84 micrograms of particulates per cubic metre.

So lacking has been a sense of urgency that the Ombudsman has agreed to investigate a complaint by Friends of the Earth that the administration is dragging its feet on revising the city's air-quality objectives. The government has wasted enough time on a futile search for community consensus on measures against air pollution. A consensus that we all want to breathe cleaner air is the one that counts. There is an urgent need to act on it.

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