ASIA KILLER BATTLEFIELD AIR

UN : ASIA is a critical killer battlefield in the global fight to rein in air pollution, registering about 5 million premature deaths each year-

Delegates at a - United Nations conference said on a Wednesday, as it urged tougher enforcement of curbs.

The World Health Organization {WHO} calls air pollution the greatest environmental risk to human health.

About 90 percent of all related deaths take place in low - and middle-income countries, most of them in Southeast Asia and the pacific.

''There's a sense that if you are developing economically it doesn't mean that you have to live in a city where you can't breathe the air,'' Dechen Tsering, the Asia-Pacific director of the U.N. Environment programme, said at the two-day event.

''There is also a growing sense that there are technologies, there is financing [to help],'' said Tsering adding that the region was a key battleground in the fight.

Air pollution grew more than 5-percent between 2008 and 2013 in more than two-thirds of Southeast  Asian cities, the WTO said in a report in 2016.

[Agencies]