Hannah Ritchie shows that air quality in many countries has improved significantly over the years, with significant reductions in pollutants like sulfur dioxide. She argues that we can accelerate this process in the countries where it has not
… we could expect that all countries will go through this transition naturally, just like the UK and many other rich countries did. The problem is that this process took a long time: centuries, in fact. If it takes the rest of the world just as long, billions of people will be exposed to high levels of air pollution for most of their lives. Hundreds of millions will die prematurely due to air pollution.