A study published in Nature has quantified the deaths linked to diesel vehicles' out-of-norm emissions: 38,000. The equivalent of the population of a city like Rovereto.
Not only environmental damage. The consequences of the Dieselgate scandal over falsified pollutant emissions — which erupted in the United States in September 2015 and subsequently spread to Europe — have now been quantified from a public health perspective as well. A study published in the scientific journal Nature has put the number of additional premature deaths attributable — for 2015 alone — to excess emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) at as many as 38,000. That is equivalent to the entire population of Italian cities the size of Saronno or Rovereto.
The researchers — led by Susan Anenberg of the Environmental Health Analytics institute in Washington, in collaboration with the University of Colorado — analysed data on vehicles in circulation across the eleven largest world markets: the European Union, the United States, China, India, Russia, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Japan and South Korea. Countries that account for over 80 per cent of global sales of new diesel vehicles.
The findings are particularly alarming: according to the study, one in three heavy-duty vehicles and one in two light-duty vehicles currently in circulation emit a quantity of nitrogen oxides that exceeds the limits set by the regulations of the countries in question. In particular, as the newspaper Le Monde reports, under real-world driving conditions the cumulative emissions from diesel engines across the eleven countries analysed amounted to over 13.1 million tonnes of NOx. And specifically, "4.6 million tonnes more than the 8.6 million estimated on the basis of laboratory measurements."
The American study also indicated that, out of a total of around 110 million tonnes of nitrogen oxides released into the Earth's atmosphere every year from "anthropogenic causes" — that is, linked to the many activities of human beings: from industry to energy production, through to agriculture — approximately 22.4 million tonnes come from diesel vehicles alone (an estimate covering the entire world). The good news, however, is that, the document states, "by adopting and strengthening ecological standards more stringent than Euro 6," emissions could fall sharply over the coming decades. Conversely, if governments fail to act in this direction, the number of premature deaths in 2040 could reach 174,000.
Last March, moreover, another study — produced in that instance by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Mit) — had estimated at 1,200 the number of premature deaths caused in Europe by Volkswagen vehicles alone whose nitrogen oxide emissions had been manipulated. For the same scandal, in the United States, the German carmaker was forced to pay out 15 billion dollars (13.6 billion euros) in compensation for the damage caused, in favour of a fund managed by the American Environmental Protection Agency.