Advanced International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research

E-ISSN: 2584-0487 •   Impact Factor: 9.11

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Breathing Inequality: Air Pollution, Urbanization, and Environmental Justice in the Global South

Author(s) Prof. Seema Mehra Parihar
Country India
Abstract Air pollution has become one of the signature health and equity issues of the urban Global South, and the burden is uneven. It was associated with an estimated 8.1 million deaths worldwide in 2021, second only to high blood pressure among risk factors, and about nine in 10 of those deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries. This paper interprets that statistic through the lens of environmental justice: who breathes the worst air, why they came to live where the air is worst, and what it would take to change that. Drawing on the Health Effects Institute’s State of Global Air, the IQAir World Air Quality Report (2025), the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the International Energy Agency, IRENA and UN-Habitat, we present a data-driven, comparative view of how rapid urbanization, fossil-fuel dependence and household solid-fuel use interact to produce starkly uneven exposure across South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. We posit that exposure mirrors pre-existing inequality so precisely that clean air is now a stand-in for economic and social standing. The paper also resists a fatalism. Over a decade, Beijing reduced fine-particle pollution by 64 per cent, Mexico City reduced its particulate load by about half over a generation, and India’s clean-cooking programme reached more than a hundred million households. None of these are complete victories, but they are all proof that the problem is tractable where measurement, financing, and political attention converge. The contribution here is to see the unequal distribution of breathable air not as an unfortunate side effect of growth but as a governable consequence of urban and energy policy.
Keywords air pollution; PM2.5; environmental justice; Global South; urbanization; household air pollution; clean cooking; informal settlements; clean-energy transition; breathing inequality.
Discipline Sociology > Health
Published In Volume 4, Issue 3, May-June 2026
Published On 2026-06-28
DOI https://doi.org/10.62127/aijmr.2026.v04i03.1383
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