One of the World’s Biggest Health Risks Is a Philanthropic Blind Spot

On June 7 of last year, the skies across New York City and large swaths of the state turned hazy from wildfire smoke blowing in from Canada. Gov. Kathy Hochul warned of an “emergency situation” and cautioned residents to stay indoors. In the city, schools canceled activities, libraries closed early, and a Yankees game was postponed.

It was the most polluted day in the city since record-keeping began in 1999. The air quality index, a composite of five pollutants, skyrocketed to over 400; above 300 is considered hazardous. Most alarming, the level of fine particulate matter, which is an especially dangerous component of the index because the tiny particles of smoke, soot and other pollutants penetrate deep into the lungs, was the highest recorded in any city in the world on that day and three times as much as the federal health standard.

For New York City, this was an anomaly. The city’s air quality is generally pretty good. But that is not the case for hundreds of cities around the world. For them, many days are like what New York City residents experienced that day last June. Or often worse.

The Air Quality Life Index at the University of Chicago, which measures the impact of air pollution on life expectancy, shows that people living in the most polluted places on Earth breathe air that has six times as much pollution as the air breathed by people in the least polluted places — and those in the most polluted places are seeing their lives cut short by more than two years because of it. An estimated 8.1 million people globally died in 2021 from the health impacts of breathing dirty air, according to a 2024 report by the Health Effects Institute and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

Private philanthropy could do much to turn the corner on this problem in some of the most polluted parts of the planet. But just an average of $41.3 million in known philanthropic funds is devoted each year to countering air pollution, according to a recent report by the Clean Air Fund, a philanthropic group based in London. That is less than 1 percent of the more than $5 billion spent annually by one major funder, the Global Fund, to combat malaria, H.I.V./AIDS and tuberculosis.

This is especially disconcerting because particulate matter in air pollution has become the world’s largest contributor to the global disease burden — a metric quantifying premature death and sickness — and one of the greatest threats to life expectancy, outstripping the impacts of malaria, H.I.V./AIDS and transportation injuries combined. Polluted air does not just cut off a few years at the end of a long life. It is the second highest risk of death for children 5 and under.