How ‘smog capital of Poland’ saved 6,000 lives by cutting soot levels | Air pollution

AAs a child, Marcel Mazur had to hold his breath in areas of Krakow where “there was so much smoke that you could see and smell it”. Today, as an allergy specialist at the Jagiellonian University Medical College who treats patients who have difficulty breathing, he knows all too well the damage these toxic gases cause inside the human body.

“It’s not that we feel like nothing can be done. But it’s difficult,” Mazur said.

Krakow, long known as Poland’s smog capital, is proof that politicians have the power to save lives by cleaning the air. A drop in soot levels since 2013, when the city announced it would ban coal and wood in heating homes, has prevented almost 6,000 premature deaths in a decade, according to an expert assessment shared exclusively with the Guardian.

Mazur’s research separately showed that there were 17% fewer cases of asthma and 28% fewer cases of allergic rhinitis among children in 2018 compared to 2008.

Anna Dworakowska, co-founder and director of Polish Smog Alert, said: “This is a huge improvement.” Polish Smog Alert is a network of campaign groups that started in Krakow and has led a national campaign to improve air quality in Poland. “A little over 10 years ago in Krakow we had around 150 days a year of too high particle concentrations. Today this figure is only 30,” Dworakowska added.

The ban on burning solid fuels in Krakow came into force in 2019, by which time most of the tens of thousands of dirty stoves and boilers had been replaced. The local government subsidized the switch to cleaner heating methods, sometimes paying the full cost, and limited the fuels that could be burned in the years before the ban.

Reducing soot – known as black carbon – has saved 5,897 lives in a decade, according to the European Clean Air Centre. The researchers used established methods to calculate the death toll and relied on a special station in Wrocław to estimate the fraction of black carbon in the tiny particles (PM2.5) they measured in Krakow.

Lukasz Adamkiewicz, president of the European Clean Air Center, said the progress was the result of a rare consensus between parties of all political stripes. “Green, red, black, right, left, up, down – everyone said, ‘OK, this is a problem we need to address.’

Black carbon is a more potent superpollutant than the carbon dioxide released during the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass. At the United Nations climate summit in November, nine countries announced first-of-its-kind plans to reduce black carbon emissions as part of efforts to combat global warming and save local lives from bad air.

Rachel Huxley, head of mitigation at health charity Wellcome, said: “It’s a big deal. If we take action to tackle superpollutants, we can have a huge impact on global warming and also all these premature health impacts.”

Premature deaths from fine particles in Poland fell by 18% between 2005 and 2022, according to the latest data, and across the EU they plunged by 45%.

Krakow, the capital of the Małopolska coal region, has experienced perhaps the most dramatic change in air quality in Poland. In 2024, no exceedances of daily limits were recorded for benzo(a)pyrene, another carcinogenic pollutant from wood and coal combustion, for the first year since measurements began, according to the Polish smog alert.

Pollution is expected to fall further with the introduction of a low emissions zone – limiting the types of vehicles that can travel in around 60% of the city – at the start of the year.

Experts say more needs to be done. At the end of January, Krakow briefly became the most polluted large city in the world, ahead of Lahore in Pakistan and Calcutta in India, according to a ranking of 120 global cities carried out by IQAir. Smog comes to Krakow from surrounding towns and villages, where coal and wood dominate home heating and the city has little say in politics.

Things are not going as well elsewhere in Poland, said Mazur, who has a house in Szczawnica, a small town in the south of the country. Before replacing the coal boiler, he had to fill it with fuel three times a day in winter and clean it of ash just as often. Switching to a heat pump and gas boiler was “incomparably more practical and much more environmentally friendly”, he said.

“What happens in the towns and villages around Krakow has a direct impact on the air quality in our city,” Mazur said.

The opposite may also be true. Krakow’s ban sparked similar policies across Poland, with pressure from citizens and campaign groups generating political enthusiasm to adopt anti-smog measures and limit the burning of the dirtiest fuels.

Experts say its success could guide polluted cities in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, where the death toll from air pollution is high but public discontent rarely rises to the level of protests or organized campaigns.

Huxley said: “My experience working with cities is that you can’t do it without public support. Either that will boost it, or without it you’ll be paralyzed.”