As I suggested in my previous article, polluted regions of the world are more likely to suffer from the consequences of global warming.
​
The following lines are devoted to exploring the relationship between air quality and human development. Were my intuition to be validated by the data, we would have to add yet another dimension to the set of inequalities separating the Western world from the rest: economic hardships would now be linked to a more polluted environment, and consequently a greater risk of facing the potential consequences of global warming. A single indicator such as the HDI (Human Development Index) would suffice to signal a threefold discrepancy in quality of life between a poor country and a developed one.
​
Pushing the intuition one step further before proceeding to actually plot the relationship, I imagined that really poor countries, mainly those in sub-Saharan Africa, should not be prone to high levels of pollution, mainly because they most likely lack the industrial means to impact their countries in a dramatic way. On the other extreme, the most developed countries should also have a rather low pollution index, considering the multiple environmental procedures that are in place all over Europe and Northern America. That is, these countries should have reached a level of relative control over the impact of their industry on the environment, and should thus rank relatively low on the pollution scale.
​
We are left with the middle part of the scale on the HDI axis, populated by those countries that are considered as "emerging". On the contrary of more developed countries, these regions of the world only recently got their hands on industrial strengths on massive scales. Furthermore, their main motive is to catch up as quickly as possible with the first world and to exit their middle-class status as soon as possible. It seems reasonable to suggest that this mentality may lead them to favor the better end over the cleaner means more often than not, and we can expect their pollution index to rise accordingly with their more or less environmentally-blind decisions.
​
The ongoing speculations thus suggest that we should obtain a sort of upward facing hyperbola, with pollution levels starting low around mostly sub-Saharan, extremely poor countries, then rising the highest for developing countries, supposedly located in Asia, South America and North Africa, before finally plunging back down as we enter the right extreme of the HDI axis.
​
Now for the actual data collection: I used the WHO ambient air pollution database, which is available online and maps multiple cities and countries of the world to two measures of their levels of pollution, namely PM 10 and PM 2.5 concentration. Without going into the details, these values refer to the concentration of small particles issued from pollution in the air surrounding us. Together, they indicate the level of air purity of a given environment. I thus created a pollution index by simply averaging these two values into a single column.
​
Additionally, I scraped HDI data from the UNDP - United Nations Development Programme - and proceeded to merge both pollution and development indicators into a single data frame, along with their corresponding countries. I should note that since the WHO pollution database only included a limited number of countries, the final plot only includes 91 countries out of 192 - a number always up for contestation. I still consider that 91 is a significant enough number of observations to give full credence to the results suggested by the plot.
​
This is where the miracle comes in:
Is Climate Change Real? [Part 2]
The Middle-Class Paradox Hits Again
Inequalities may extend further than most would care to admit, all the way to a newborn's first breath.
Intuition and objective reality seem to perfectly coincide on the issue. The evolution of the pollution index as the HDI index moves from zero to one clearly confirms the fact that emerging countries tend to have the highest pollution levels, and that the more developed countries are slowly moving toward cleaner alternatives in their industrial considerations.
​
Interestingly, the situation we are facing is reminiscent of the middle-class paradox: while the richest folks have realized their ambitions and the poorest individuals eventually come to terms with their situation, learning to appreciate the simple things in life, the middle-class is often caught in an endless struggle to reach up to the richer class while keeping up from falling into the left extreme. In other words, replacing pollution by level of financial frustration and HDI by average income and should yield more or less the same graph.
​
However, let us not loose track of the main insight that the graph provides us. The implications of this plot reach far beyond petty analogies; indeed, they serve as a reminder that the range of inequalities dividing the planet are far more nuanced, and include many more hidden variables than most people would care to admit.
​
With the data clearly conveying the validity of the hypothesis, we must recognize a rather tragic reality: by mere hazard, a baby will be reaching for his or her first breath in a developing country that, on top of severely limiting his or her future opportunities, will confront him with a polluted environment and a region at risk for draught and heat waves, while another baby across the globe is born in a developed country with cleaner air and a lesser risk for climate change - at least temporarily.