DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Working with my group of 4 including Ericka Sares, James B. Wheatley, Robert C. Rodriguez, and Paula Rzasa, we assessed  the main countries we focused on were U.K., Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, and Hungary. Some of the metrics my team focused on was the air quality which was poor in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, and in Hungary and water quality and access which is on an upwards trend in Hungary. The U. K. was the only of the four nations to have had improvements in air quality as of its Montreal Protocol in 1987. 

 

In my portion of the presentation and for my essay analysis I chose to focus on the metrics of death attributable to pollution. I was advised to remove data about Angola from my paper as it is not a good topographical or economoical comparison to European nations though at first I related it to the industrialist nation of Poland. 

 

Angola is based off of diamond mining and the state of industrialism is a bit different from the aforementioned European nations not to mention that the warm nation's topography is a flat coastal land and plateaus which is different from the midcontinental lowland plains of Poland, high plains, plateaus  and mountain region of Bosnia and Herzegovinaand Hungary, and the rolling hills and low valleys of England. 

 

Addressing this information I still find it to be a good contrast to the European nations to post the information for Angola because the economic focus on industrialism left from the Soviet relationship during the Cold War and the warm plains and plateaus are not too far from the european nations' focus.  Rather than completely drop the data for lack of knowledge I will leave it there until a better argument to keep it arises. I admittedly know only little about this topic so for reasons of disagreement please inform me below in the comments section. 

 

Using the U.N. Regional Environment Analysis page the deaths of people attributable to different types of pollution can be analyzed. 4 core metrics were analyzed in this study for 3 nations within the European (UN GEO-6) Regions.

 

The first metric is DALYs attributable to ambient air pollution this analysis was only taken by the U.N. in 2012 so it does not offer any other comparison years.

 


Figure 1 Number of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) of Angola- blue, Bosnia and Herzegovina- black, Poland – green, and United Kingdom – Orange. Taken from the UN Environment Website http://uneplive.unep.org/country/data/BA#charts


This measure is based off of epidemiological studies of respiratory disease, heart disease, and cancers that have been linked to pollution in the environment. DALYs measures the number of deaths by the standard life expectancy times the number of incident cases for the respiratory diseases by the average duration of cases. DALY is basically a measure for the amount of healthy life years that are lost due to pollution. Each prospective year that a person is not alive is seen as a death in this analysis which is an extremely deep view. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the amount of death years was 76,293, in Poland the amount of death years was 572,883, in the United Kingdom the amount of death years was 314,497. It is surprising that the years for Bosnia and Herzegovina are so low when taking into consideration how the heavy steel industry has affected the air quality. The high numbers in Poland are to be expected due to the heavy coal and animal product industry which produces many sulfur trioxide and methane emissions.

 

The choice of Angola seen in these graphs was arbitrary and chosen solely on the fact that it is a non- European nation which should act as a good comparison. Though chosen arbitrarily it provides good data on how very different European nations relate to the greater world.


In Angola ambient air pollution amounted to 444, 375 death years in 2012, 2nd highest from the industrialist Poland which makes sense seeing as the oil and diamond mining industry is high. However, one would expect that due to Poland’s greater accessibility to sustainable waste management equipment, that it would have less.

 

The second metric is deaths attributable to ambient air pollution. This metric is different from DALYs attributable to ambient air pollution because it measures purely the number of people who physically died from respiratory diseases in the year 2012.

 


Figure 2 Deaths Attributable to ambient air pollution in Angola, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland and the United Kingdom Taken from the UN Environmental Website http://uneplive.unep.org/country/data/BA#charts


In Angola the was 7,058 which is vastly different from the expected number of death years in DALY. This is attributable to the expected life span of those in Angola being higher if there was less pollution which meant that the number of DALY would be higher since the actual life span in Angola is low. There is not such a large discrepancy in numbers when viewing Bosnia and Herzegovina at 3,538, Poland at 26,589, and United Kingdom at 16,355 actual deaths due to pollution related disease and health issues. This is because the life expectancy is measured at optimum amounts for the European countries and the number of incidents is moderately diagnosed and not expanding.

 

The third metric is number of deaths attributable to the environment. This takes measure of all environmental pollution including climate change, noise, construction, electromagnetic radiation, cultural habits that spread infectious diseases or poor jobs reducing quality of life, and chemical contamination. These do not include disease.

Figure 3 Percentage of Deaths Attributable to Environmental Pollution in Angola, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, and the United Kingdom Taken from the UN Environmental Website http://uneplive.unep.org/country/data/BA#charts


This metric is very surprising due to the shear lack of numbers included in it for the year 2012. One would expect there would be a greater number of deaths to total environment considering the deaths to air alone with air caused diseases analyzed were 50 times higher than the numbers shown here. In Angola there were 53 which measures exactly with Poland and is only overcome by the United Kingdom which totaled 59 deaths in 2012 from total pollution. Surprisingly Bosnia and Herzegovina was only 8. Shown below in Figure 4 is the DALYs view of it in which Bosnia and Herzegovina is highly skewed most likely due to the greater amount of total pollution in Bosnia and Herzegovina as compared to the less skewed view when it was just air pollution.  

 

It is hard to escape pollution in Bosnia and Herzegovina because of the large steel industrial output there is a lot of particulate that is left in the air and the low valley trapped between the mountains does not allow much of it to spread out so it is concentrated.


Figure 4 DALYS Attributable to Environmental Pollution in Angola, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, and the United Kingdom Taken from the UN Environmental Website http://uneplive.unep.org/country/data/BA#charts


The fourth metric is the percentage of deaths attributable to the total pollution of all sources in the environment.

Figure 5 Percentage of Deaths Attributable to Environmental Pollution in Angola, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, and the United Kingdom Taken from the UN Environmental Website http://uneplive.unep.org/country/data/BA#charts


Angola, 26 percent, compared considerably to Bosnia and Herzegovina, 27, with their considerable industrial production habits. Poland was only 16 % when the all of environmental pollution is considered and United Kingdom only 12%. These numbers are more of what one would expect from a developed nation, but are still high as it should be a percentage of less than 1% as the optimum nation would be.

 

Citations:
http://uneplive.unep.org/country/data/BA#charts
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/metrics_daly/en/

 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.