A new report from the World Bank has classified Nigeria, India, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as the top three countries with the highest poverty and pollution exposure in the world.
The report, tagged ‘Detox Development: Repurposing Environmentally Harmful Subsidies’ questioned how trillions of dollars of subsidies for agriculture, fishing, and fossil fuels were wasted instead of being used to address climate change.
The Financial Group’s Senior Managing Director, Axel Van Trotsenburg in the course of giving more light on the report, said, “People say that there isn’t money for climate, but there is—it’s just in the wrong places. If we could repurpose the trillions of dollars being spent on wasteful subsidies and put these to better, greener uses, we could together address many of the planet’s most pressing challenges.”
The report identified 716 million poor people in unsafe air-polluted areas; while 80 percent were exposed to unsafe levels of PM, with low- and middle-income countries forming the bulk of this figure, with about half in Nigeria, India, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The report says, “”The distribution of poor people exposed to unsafe or hazardous levels of pollution is highly skewed: almost half (48.6 percent) are located in just three countries. India, with a population of more than 202 million, has the highest absolute number of extreme poor exposed to unsafe levels of particulate matter, corresponding to 14.7 percent of India’s overall population. Nigeria is a distant second, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Overall, the top 10 countries account for 67.8 percent of the total incidence of all of the extreme poor who are exposed to unsafe concentrations of PM globally.”