Only 7 countries meet the international standard for air quality, with air pollution worsening in some places due to a boom in economic activity and the toxic effects of smoke from forest fires, a new report has found.
Of the 134 countries and regions examined in the report, only 7 - Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland, Mauritius and New Zealand - meet the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended standard for small particles in the air emitted by cars, trucks and industrial processes.
The vast majority of countries fail to meet this standard for PM2.5, a type of microscopic soot particles smaller than the width of a human hair that, when inhaled, can cause countless health problems and deaths, risking serious consequences for humans, said the report by Swiss air quality organization IQAir, which draws on data from more than 30,000 monitoring stations around the world.
Although the world's air is generally much cleaner than it was for most of the last century, there are still places where pollution levels are particularly dangerous. In the most polluted country, Pakistan, PM2.5 levels are more than 14 times higher than the WHO standard, the IQAir report found, with the next most polluted countries being India, Tajikistan and Burkina Faso.
But even in rich and rapidly developing countries, progress in reducing air pollution is in jeopardy. Canada, long thought to have one of the cleanest air basins in the western world, last year found itself in the worst position in terms of PM2.5 due to record wildfires that ravaged the country, sending toxic spirit gases across the country and in the US.
Meanwhile, in China, air quality improvements were compounded last year by the recovery of economic activity after the COVID-19 pandemic, with the report finding a 6.5% increase in PM2.5 levels.
"Unfortunately things have backfired," said Slava Dolphin Hames, IQAir's CEO for North America. "The science is pretty clear about the impact of air pollution, and yet we're used to having a background level of pollution that's too high to be healthy. We're not making corrections fast enough."
Air pollution kills about 7 million people a year worldwide - more than AIDS and malaria combined - and this burden is felt most acutely in developing countries, which rely on particularly dirty fuels for heating, lighting and indoor cooking.
According to IQAir's sixth annual report, the world's most polluted urban area last year was Begusarai in India, with India hosting the world's four most polluted cities. However, reliable measurements of air quality are lacking in much of the developing world, especially in Africa.
The WHO has lowered its guidelines for "safe" levels of PM2.5 in 2021 to 5 micrograms per cubic meter, and by this measure, many countries, such as those in Europe, which have significantly cleaned up their air over the past 20 years, are failing to are coping.
But even this stricter guideline may not fully reflect the risk of insidious air pollution. Research published by US scientists last month found that there is no safe level of PM2.5, with even the smallest exposures linked to increased hospitalizations for conditions such as heart disease and asthma.
Hames said states should take action to make their cities more walkable and less dependent on cars, change forestry practices to reduce the impact of wildfire smoke, and more quickly adopt clean energy instead of fossil fuels. "We share the atmosphere with everyone else in the world and we have to make sure we don't do things that harm those elsewhere," she said.
Aidan Farrow, senior air quality scientist at Greenpeace International, said better air quality monitoring is also needed.
"In 2023, air pollution remains a global health disaster, and IQAir's global dataset is an important reminder of the resulting injustices and the need to implement the many existing solutions to this problem," he said. /BGNES
