The environmental group’s Silent killers: Why Europe must replace coal power with green energy report draws on research from Stuttgart University to model the impact of coal plants on human health.

The report, published last week, blamed the increase in the use of coal-fired power for the increase in the occurrence of a raft of health problems including asthma and lung cancer.

It said despite talk of climate change and emissions standards, the EU was failing to set appropriate regulations on coal plant emissions and was allowing more “killer” plants to be developed.

“This year is supposed to be the EU’s ‘Year of Air’,” Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo said in the report’s preface.

“Yet, Europe’s politicians are not stopping the more than 50 new coal-fired power plants being built or in the development stage that will increase the death toll.”

The report said the university’s research showed that in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic more deaths were associated with air pollution from coal-fired power plants than with road traffic accidents.

In Germany and the UK, coal-fired power stations were associated with almost as many deaths as road accidents.

Overall, the researchers estimated that the deaths of approximately 22,000 people in the EU in 2010 were attributable to pollution from coal-fired power plants.

The report said while the use of coal in Europe’s power generation declined steadily from almost 40% in 1990 to 26% in 2009, since then Europe had experienced a relapse.

“Generators have switched from using gas-fired power plants to coal-fired power plants, driven by the failure of governments to set a meaningful cap on CO2 emissions and the influx of relatively affordable coal imported from the US,” the report said.

It added that European coal consumption grew by 11% in just three years from 2009 to 2012.

The environmental group called for EU countries to prevent new coal-fired power plants from being developed and to make the switch to renewable technologies such as wind and solar instead.

Greenpeace called for all existing plants to have emission control technology and requested that EU air pollution standards be set as soon as possible.