These were the best and worst places for air quality in 2021, new report shows

The Only 222 cities of the 6,475 analyzed had average air quality that met WHO’s standard. Three territories were found to have met WHO guidelines: the French territory of New Caledonia and the United States territories of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were among the countries with the worst air pollution, exceeding the guidelines by at least 10 times. The Scandinavian countries, Australia, Canada, Japan and United Kingdom ranked among the best countries for air quality, with average levels that exceeded the guidelines by 1 to 2 times.In the United States, IQAir found air pollution exceeded WHO guidelines by 2 to 3 times in 2021.”This report underscores the need for governments around the world to help reduce global air pollution,” Glory Dolphin Hammes, CEO of IQAir North America, told CNN. “(Fine particulate matter) 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.”Above: IQAir analyzed average annual air quality for more than 6,000 cities and categorized them from best air quality, in blue (Meets WHO PM2.5 guildline) to worst, in purple (Exceeds WHO PM2.5 guideline by over 10 times). AnMillions of people die each year from air quality issues. In 2016, around Climate change-fueled wildfires played a significant role in reducing air quality in the US in 2021. The authors pointed to a number of fires that led to hazardous air pollution — including the Caldor and Dixie fires in California, as well as the Bootleg Fire in Oregon, which Hammes noted the African country of Chad was included in the report for the first time, due to an improvement in its monitoring network. IQAir found the country’s air pollution was the second-highest in the world last year, behind Bangladesh. Tarik Benmarhnia, a climate change epidemiologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who has studied the health impact of wildfire smoke, also noted that relying only on monitoring stations can lead to blind spots in these reports.”I think it is great that they relied on different networks and not only governmental sources,” Benmarhnia, who was not involved in this report, told CNN. “However, many regions do not have enough stations and alternative techniques exist.”The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in its 2021 report that, in addition to slowing the speed of global warming, curbing the use of fossil fuels would have the added benefit of improving air quality and public health. Hammes said the IQAir report is even more reason for the world to wean off fossil fuel.”We’ve got the report, we can read it, we can internalize it and really devote ourselves to taking action,” she said. “There needs to be a major move towards renewable energy. We need to take drastic action in order to reverse the tide of global warming; otherwise, the impact and the train that we’re on (would be) irreversible.”