“ENVIRONMENT kills 100,000 youngsters”; “UN says one third of child deaths due to environment”. These were just two headlines in newspapers across Europe, prompted by a World Health Organisation (WHO) study published last week.

Can it really be so? Do 100,000 children die each year in Europe, victims of air pollution, environmental hazards and ecological degradation? The numbers sound far-fetched. Fortunately neither the headlines nor the report represent the truth.

The key problem is that the WHO has interpreted the term “environment” very broadly. The word is used to refer to the entire dangerous big wide world out there. Using the WHO’s definition, the environment even includes traffic accidents — the greatest killer of children in Europe. The death toll on the roads is terrible, but by no stretch of the imagination is it caused by what we would normally refer to as the environment. To call a road death “environmental ” is to direct attention to the wrong place. When it comes to children’s survival, we should first do something about road safety.

Road deaths, drownings, poisonings and other such accidents account for approximately 75,000 children’s deaths per year. Poor water quality and sanitation — not what we typically understand as environmental problems — are responsible for several thousand more deaths. When these are removed from the WHO death toll, around 24,000 fatalities remain. This is the true number of lives taken by what we reasonably understand as the environment. Among these deaths, the greatest killer is air pollution.

IT IS not only the environment that is elastically defined in the WHO’s report. Europe has also strangely expanded past its boundaries: Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are included in the WHO definition of “Europe”. If we were to look at Western Europe and the richest Eastern European countries alone, we would find that environmental factors cause the deaths of 178 children a year. That is 178 too many, but a far cry from the WHO’s 100,000.

By defining the environment and Europe so flexibly, the WHO has overdramatised the environment’s contribution to child deaths in Europe. While its report gives the impression that environmental problems are overwhelming, its claims do not withstand scrutiny.

However, the WHO does make one point that, while neither new nor surprising, is important: environmental problems are worst in the poorest European countries. These are nations such as Poland, Romania and Slovenia. The good news is that we can do a great deal to improve matters.

Richer European countries should support environmental work in Eastern Europe, both because many environmental problems do not respect borders, and because their efforts will have the greatest impact in those regions. For it is a fact of environmental economics that as an environment becomes cleaner, it becomes more expensive to combat pollution, but when it is very dirty, as in many Eastern European countries, cleaning up reaps dividends and a little money has a large beneficial effect. There are particularly good opportunities to control air pollution, CO2 and nutrient pollution in the Baltic.

Does the WHO report matter? Misleading headlines such as “Environment kills 100,000 youngsters” stick. The space that these messages occupy in the media detract from causes where we can make a difference. The WHO report ensures that we miss the real point — we should pay attention to the important environmental problems that do exist on Europe’s poor fringe, and direct our efforts there.

The author is director of the Environmental Assessment Institute

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