Air quality management in the Indo-Gangetic Plain and Himalayan foothills

Objective

The Indo-Gangetic Plain and Himalayan Foothills (IGP-HF) air quality management (AQM) science–policy dialogue  will provide a platform for the four countries sharing the IGP-HF airshed to highlight their national AQM challenges; present national and regional opportunities; find commonalities with regional partner countries; exchange knowledge; facilitate partnerships for improving monitoring, decision making, and abatement actions; and explore financing opportunities.

Expected outcome

The SPD is expected to strengthen awareness of the four countries of one another’s challenges and recent developments in AQM. It is also expected to contribute towards greater cooperation among the IGP-HF countries, which all share a common airshed. Concrete insights will be shared on the use of an air quality monitoring tool and the IGP-HF AQM Policy Planning tool. Furthermore, this SPD is expected to bring to the fore opportunities for regional partnerships and lead to initiatives at the regional level to tackle air pollution, which could be taken up in the World Bank’s and ICIMOD’s regional air quality engagements.

Background

The Indo-Gangetic Plain – spanning Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan – has one of the most polluted airsheds in global comparison. In many places of the region, both urban and rural, air pollution has reached alarming levels, affecting the health of millions of people, particularly women, children, and the elderly; in each of these groups, the poor are the most vulnerable. The concentrations of particulate matter (PM_2.5) in the region are many-fold above WHO air quality guidelines. In the IGP-HF, it is often double to triple the least stringent WHO target (i.e. Interim Target 1, which is 35 µg/m³ of annual average). There is an even larger gap to the guideline that characterises clean air (which is a value of 5 µg/m³).

The socioeconomic impact of this slow-motion disaster on the environment, human health, and society is immense. The estimated costs in health care and loss of productivity due to air pollution in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka include 1.75 million premature deaths each year collectively in these countries, welfare losses equivalent to between 4.7% and 7.8% of GDP, depending on the country, and forgone labour output of between 0.47% and 0.8% of their GDP, depending on the country.

The largest sources of air pollution in the IGP-HF are similar for all four countries: household emissions from cookstoves, open burning of agricultural residue, industrial sources (such as brick kilns), transportation (especially diesel engines), and solid-waste burning. Hence, there is a strong imperative to foster cross-country knowledge exchanges, particularly focussing on best practices and success stories. In addition, the pollution from one country, or subnational area inside a country, may have a significant environmental and human impact elsewhere, given the transboundary nature of the air pollution challenge and the airflows across different countries. Therefore, it is vital for the countries to coordinate their monitoring, planning, and abatement design efforts.

Climate change is closely related to the air pollution challenges in these countries. The sources of air pollution mentioned above are the same sources that contribute to climate change. Moreover, much like for the air pollution challenge, the IGP-HF region also has significant climate mitigation externalities – the IGP-HF currently contributes to about 9% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Policies that reduce air pollution also simultaneously reduce short-lived climate pollutants, such as black carbon, which are of particularly potent climate forcers.

The four countries of the region have articulated their ambitions for cleaner South Asian air, in Vision 2030, during a high-level World Bank Spring Meeting event in 2021 titled ‘Solutions for Improved Air Quality and Green Recovery in South Asia’.

ICIMOD’s Regional Programme on Atmosphere

ICIMOD is a regional intergovernmental learning and knowledge sharing centre serving the eight Regional Member Countries of the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan – and is based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Their Regional Programme on Atmosphere aims to improve understanding of air pollutant emissions, atmospheric processes and change, and impacts and promote mitigation and policy solutions while building awareness, capacity, and collaboration in the HKH and upwind regions. The programme aims to promote the adoption of effective measures and policies to reduce air pollution and its impacts within the HKH through improved knowledge and enhanced capacity of our regional partners. They engage in generating data and evidence; identifying, testing, and piloting mitigation solutions; capacity building and outreach; fostering regional collaboration and cross-border network building; and contributing to policy at local, national, regional, and global levels.

The World Bank’s Regional Programme on Air Pollution in the Indo-Gangetic Plain and Himalayan Foothills

The World Bank has been working on AQM in all countries of the IGP-HF. On the one hand, the World Bank has developed several air quality investment projects in different countries such as the Punjab Green Development Project (PGDP) in Pakistan and the Bangladesh Environmental Sustainability and Transformation (BEST) project. The World Bank is currently also working on developing air quality projects in several states in India, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Haryana. It has supported policy reforms that are critical for reducing air pollution by incentivising cleaner alternatives, such as the Green, Resilient, and Inclusive Development (GRID) Policy Credit of Nepal, where a reduction of the import costs of electric vehicles was supported.

The World Bank has also launched the development of the IGP-HF Air Quality Policy Planning tool, which is currently being piloted in several countries and will be expanded to additional countries. This tool will enable decision makers to critically understand air pollution sources in different areas of scale (from local, to national, to regional), and also the effectiveness and cost of engineering and technological solutions. Through its regional programme, the World Bank seeks to continue supporting regional dialogues, develop the IGP-HF AQM Policy Planning tool for each country in the IGP-HF (creating a nested regional tool), and work on concrete air quality solutions.

Agenda and objectives

The SPD will take place over two days.