TITLE:
Investigating the Association between Environmental Degradation and Population Health: A Country-Level Study
AUTHORS:
Wullianallur Raghupathi
KEYWORDS:
Environmental Degradation, Air Pollution, Particulate Matter, Life Expectancy, Tuberculosis, Population Health, Climate Change, Panel Data, Environmental Burden of Disease
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection,
Vol.14 No.10,
October
30,
2026
ABSTRACT: Environmental degradation is widely held to harm human health, yet cross-national evidence is complicated by the fact that the same affluence that reduces pollution also funds the health systems that extend life, so simple comparisons confound the two. Using a country-year panel of 70 countries observed over 2009-2020 (721 observations, averaging 10.3 years per country and spanning all four World Bank income groups), we relate six environmental-degradation indicators—particulate pollution, per-capita greenhouse-gas emissions, and energy, mineral, and forest depletion, and freshwater withdrawals—to two population-health outcomes, life expectancy and the incidence of tuberculosis, and a composite, controlling for income, education, and health-system capacity (physicians and health expenditure). Environmental degradation is associated with worse health: higher particulate pollution, greenhouse-gas emissions, and energy and forest depletion are associated with lower life expectancy, and energy depletion with higher tuberculosis incidence. The central result is the particulate-pollution association with life expectancy, which is large and significant both across countries and—unlike most cross-national environmental associations—within countries over time, surviving country and year fixed effects and net of health-system capacity, and robust to measuring exposure with one- to three-year lags. Directional tests find no evidence that health outcomes predict subsequent environmental degradation, and no evidence of temporal precedence in either direction for the particulate-longevity pair, so the estimates are reported as associations consistent with an environment-to-health reading rather than as causal identification. We assess robustness with fixed-effects, Driscoll-Kraay, and system-GMM estimators and specification, reverse-causality, Granger, and lagged-exposure tests, and interpret the results through the environmental burden of disease and the development-health literature. The findings indicate that air pollution in particular carries a measurable longevity cost that economic development and medical capacity do not fully offset.