Causes and impacts of air pollution on international society. Case study: Possible solutions for Lebanon

Abstract

Air pollution occurs when any harmful gas, dust or smoke enters into the atmosphere and negatively affects the lives of humans, animals and plants. Moreover, air pollution is found everywhere around us in the air we breathe, the water we drink and it can be either natural or man-made.In this article, we will discuss, analyze and give our observation and possible solutions concerning the different produced types of air pollution e.g. Indoor and Outdoor, and their impact on the environment, health, economy and development of ecosystem. Also we have deliberate the indoor air pollution and their presence in our surrounding environment, work area and homes, where it has been noticed that their symptoms appear as fatigue, eye-nose irritations and the most common illness the asthma. We have perceived that time exposure to the indoor air pollution plays a major role in the kind of the disease, where for a long exposure the mostly occurring health problems are respiratory sickness, heart problems and cancer. The 14 sources of indoor air pollution have been summarized and fully analyzed during this work. Concerning the outdoor air pollution most of the realized scientific studies have classify it as “The great killer of our age”, with the presence of more than one substance above the natural limits in the breathed air, and it has been recognized that the main causes of outdoor air pollution are: Agricultural activities, mining operations, Exhaust from factories and industries, burning of fossil fuel.For both sources of emission ( indoor and outdoor), short- term exposure has related with transitory respiratory diseases and a high rate of hospitalization, while long-term exposure leads to chronic asthma, pulmonary insufficiency, cardiovascular diseases and cardiovascular mortality.Also it has been deduced an increasing relationship between mortality/morbidity rate and air pollution concentration. Another important matter discussed in this work is the impact of air pollution on the society’s economy and the influence on their sustainable development.