14. Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Response for Air Pollution and Related Health Extremes

Over the past few years, air pollution has become a growing problem with an increasing number of acute incidents of air pollution in many cities across the world. As a direct consequence, air quality is contributing extreme risk to public health, accounting for about one in every nine deaths per year. Sudden and extreme air pollution episodes are creating disaster like situations causing an immediate public health emergency. Every year, as per the World Health Organization (WHO), about seven million people die tragically from air pollution-induced diseases around the world. Approximately four million such deaths occur in the Asia-Pacific region only. Now, it is not possible to perceive air pollution as an isolated environmental problem. It is high time that sudden air pollution management should be implemented into state and city planning processes. There is an urgent need for a concerted approach consisting of the generation and compilation of well-structured and exhaustive databases with geospatial locations on air pollution. There is also the requirement of effective representation and well-timely dissemination of air quality information, use of accurate and complex inferences to make significant implementation in air quality-related policy decisions.