The Hidden Costs of Air Pollution in Kazakhstan

“There’s an unpleasant smell coming from the refinery in the evenings, especially when the wind blows,” a local resident of Shymkent, Kazakhstan’s third-largest city told Vlast in a 2023 reportage.In March, official data showed that Shymkent’s air is still among the most polluted in the country.From east to west, from north to south, air pollution is a chronic issue plaguing many cities in Kazakhstan.Globally, it is considered one of the leading causes of death: a 2021 analysis by the World Health Organization found that air pollution is responsible for at least 13 deaths per minute.Yet in Kazakhstan, it is usually dismissed by the country’s authorities as a problem related to car traffic.Scientists have demonstrated that, in fact, the key cause of air pollution is the burning of fossil fuels to generate heating and electricity.Kazakhstan’s electricity generation depends on coal-fueled power plants, which burn some of the ‘dirtiest’ – or most polluting – coal in the world.An Invisible Danger, With Visible CostsIn a piece written for the United Nations Development Programme, Nomundari Urantulga, a climate activist from Mongolia, said “I grew up knowing that the very first danger I ever faced was something invisible, something we had not ever chosen.” That sentiment is relevant to Kazakhstan, too, and bears out when considering scientific findings from around the world.Air pollution – this invisible danger – has real consequences to public health: “it affects our social, environmental, and political life,” public health specialist Assel Mussabekova recently told Vlast in an interview.Economically, air pollution’s consequences are often quantified in terms of impact on health and labor productivity.In the US, for example, a 2021 study found that the economic impact of premature deaths associated with fossil fuel-generated air pollution cost the health care system $820 million per year, though that figure itself “most likely vastly underestimate[d]” the total costs of these problems, the New York-based National Resource Defence Council said, due to limits in available health data.Air pollution in Beijing in 2014.Photo by Kentaro Iemoto (Wikimedia Commons). From a more macro socioeconomic lens however, a 2025 China-focused study found that “people’s consumption behavior [also] changes in response to air pollution.”