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PARIS: Two thirds of the European Union’s population may have been exposed to harmful levels of ozone pollution during last month’s record-breaking heatwave, a report warned on Thursday.
Nearly 300 million people, including 100 million children and elderly people, faced higher-than-recommended levels of the toxic pollutant during the punishing heat in late June, according to the report from the NGO Global Witness.
The scale of this “invisible threat” highlights how “people are being forced to live through very dangerous conditions as a result of our dependence on fossil fuels,” the organisation’s senior campaigner Flossie Boyd said.
Ground-level ozone is different from the ozone layer in the atmosphere, which protects Earth from the Sun’s radiation — and is slowly recovering from damage made by refrigerants called CFCs.
