By John Ikani
The 2021 World Air Quality Report has revealed that Bangladesh is the most polluted country in 2021 with North African Country Chad occupying second spot.
IQAir’s 2021 World Air Quality Report is the first major global air quality report based on updated WHO air quality guidelines for PM2.5.
The new guidelines were released in September 2021 and cut existing annual PM2.5 guideline values from 10 µg/m3 to 5 µg/m3, said a press release on Tuesday.
Fine particle pollution, known as PM2.5, is commonly accepted to be the most harmful, widely-monitored air pollutant and has been found to be a major contributing factor to health effects such as asthma, stroke, heart and lung diseases. PM2.5 leads to millions of premature deaths every year.
The 2021 IQAir report analyses PM2.5 air pollution measurements from air monitoring stations in 6,475 cities in 118 countries, regions and territories.
According to the report released on Tuesday, Pakistan and Tajikistan came in 3rd and 4th spot respectively while India stood on the 5th spot ahead of Oman, Kyrgyzstan, Bahrain, Iraq, and Nepal.
The report went on to note that only 3% of cities and no country met the latest World Health Organisation’s PM2.5 annual air quality guidelines.
Speaking to CNN, Glory Dolphin Hammes, CEO of IQAir North America said, “This report underscores the need for governments around the world to help reduce global air pollution.
[PM2.5] kills far too many people every year and governments need to set more stringent air quality national standards and explore better foreign policies that promote better air quality.”
According to the report, India’s capital city New Delhi emerged as the most polluted capital in the world for four consecutive years..
New Delhi was followed by N’Djamena in Chad, Dushanbe in Tajikistan, and Muscat in Oman. According to the report, the Indian capital saw a 14.6% increase in PM2.5 concentrations in 2021.
Scarily enough, 35 of the 50 cities with the worst air quality are in India. “India also continues to feature prominently among the most polluted cities with 35 of the top 50 most polluted cities being in this country.
India’s annual average PM2.5 levels reached 58.1 g/m3 in 2021, ending a three-year trend of improving air quality”, the report said as per PTI. In addition to this, 46 of the world’s 50 most polluted cities are in Central and South Asia as they have the world’s worst air quality.
‘It is a shocking fact that no major city or country is providing safe and healthy air to their citizens according to the latest World Health Organisation air quality guidelines,’ said Frank Hammes, CEO of IQAir.
‘This report underscores just how much work remains to be done to ensure that everyone has safe, clean and healthy air to breathe. The time for action is now,’ he added.
Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom, on the other hand, emerged as the countries with cities having the best air quality as the pollution levels exceeded just one or two times the WHO guidelines.
In the US, Los Angeles is the most polluted among 2,400 analyzed cities. The French territory New Caledonia and US territories of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands were some of the regions that met the WHO guidelines.
