Subscribe
Only three regions — Africa, the Americas, South-East Asia — are on track to meet 30 per cent tobacco use reduction target by 2025: WHO
Despite progress, global tobacco user numbers rise due to population growth.
WHO urges stronger tobacco control measures, including higher taxes and stricter regulations on e-cigarettes.
A new report by the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that only three WHO regions are on track to achieve the Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD GAP) target of 30 per cent reduction in tobacco use from 2010-2025.
These regions include the African Region, Region of the Americas and the South-East Asia Region.
Of these three regions, the African Region is projected to achieve the target by a very narrow margin. The report projected a 2025 prevalence of 9.3 per cent against a target of 9.4 per cent by 2025. However, because of population growth, the absolute number of tobacco users continues to rise.
The Region of the Americas is on track for a 36 per cent relative reduction, with prevalence dropping to 14 per cent in 2024 from 21.3 per cent in 2010, the report noted. It shared that some countries still lack sufficient data.
In the South-East Asia region, once the world’s hotspot, prevalence among men nearly halved, going from 70 per cent in 2000 to 37 per cent in 2024. The region alone accounts for over half of the global decline.
According to the report, the regions currently not on track for a 30 per cent reduction by 2025 are the Eastern Mediterranean Region (projecting a 19 per cent relative reduction), the European Region (projecting a 19 per cent relative reduction) and the Western Pacific Region, which is reducing the slowest at 12 per cent.
Europe, another global hotspot, has reduced tobacco use from 34.9 per cent in 2000 to 24.1 per cent in 2024. But a gap of 3.2 percentage point remains from the projected prevalence for 2025 and the reduction target for the region (20.6 per cent).
In the Western Pacific, 22.9 per cent were found using tobacco in 2024, down from 25.8 per cent in 2010. While women have low prevalence at 2.5 per cent, men had the highest prevalence of all regions at 43.3 per cent in 2024.
Indonesia was moved from the South-East Asia Region to the Western Pacific Region in 2025, and the country’s results form part of the Western Pacific Region’s results throughout this report.
The global average prevalence of current tobacco use, as defined under SDG indicator 3.a.1 (percentage of the population aged 15 years and over who currently use any tobacco product), has already reduced from 26.2 per cent in 2010 to 19.5 per cent in 2024, according to the report. By 2025, the global prevalence is projected to go lower to 19.2 per cent, which equates to a relative reduction of 27 per cent by 2025 from a 2010 base. This is only three percentage points shy of the NCD GAP target.
In the report, WHO has estimated global e-cigarette use for the first time, and the numbers are alarming: More than 100 million people worldwide were recorded to be vaping.
WHO has urged governments worldwide to step up tobacco control. This means fully implementing and enforcing the MPOWER package and the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, closing loopholes that tobacco and nicotine industries use to target children, and regulating new nicotine products like e-cigarettes.
These measures can be carried out through raising tobacco taxes, banning advertising and expanding cessation services so that millions more people can quit, according to the global health agency.
