(ORDO NEWS) — Almost everywhere in the world, air pollution levels exceed safe limits, according to Bloomberg, citing scientific research.
Only one percent of the world has clean air, and the leaders of pollution are the countries of South and East Asia.
Around the world, the daily concentration of fine particles in the air most of the time exceeds the recommended limits, scientists say.
It’s no secret that air pollution is a major problem facing the world today. But how serious? A new study of global daily levels of air pollution shows that there is hardly anywhere on Earth that you can save yourself from dirty air.
About 99.82% of the globe is exposed to concentrations of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5), the smallest particles in the air that can cause lung cancer and heart disease exceeding the safety limit recommended by the World Health Organization.
And only 0.001% of the world’s population breathes air that is considered acceptable, the document says.
A study by scientists from Australia and China found that globally, on more than 70% of days in 2019, daily concentrations of PM2.5 exceeded 15 micrograms of the gaseous pollutant per cubic meter, the WHO recommended daily limit.
Air quality is of particular concern in regions such as South and East Asia, where PM2.5 concentrations exceeded the 15 microgram threshold on more than 90% of days.
While any amount of PM 2.5 is harmful, scientists and regulators tend to be less concerned about daily levels than chronic exposure.
“I hope our study can change the way scientists and policymakers think about daily exposure to PM2.5,” said Yuming Guo, lead researcher and professor of environmental conservation at Monash University.
“Short-term exposure, especially a sudden increase, to PM2.5 leads to significant health problems… If we could breathe clean air every day, of course, the long-term impact of air pollution would be less depressing.”
While scientists and public health officials have long been aware of the danger 6.7 million people die each year from air pollution, with nearly two-thirds of premature deaths caused by fine particles quantifying global exposure to PM2.5 has been challenging due to lack of pollution monitoring stations.
Guo and his co-authors solved this problem by combining ground-based air pollution measurements collected from more than five thousand monitoring stations around the world with machine learning modeling, meteorological data and geographic factors to estimate global daily PM2.5 concentrations.
When it came to estimating annual exposure across all regions, the researchers found that the highest concentrations were in East Asia (50 micrograms per cubic meter), followed by South Asia (37 micrograms) and North Africa (30 micrograms).
Residents of Australia and New Zealand experienced the least threat from fine particles, while other regions of Oceania and South America were also among the places with the lowest annual concentrations of PM2.5.
The scientists also looked at how air pollution has changed over the two decades to 2019.
For example, most parts of Asia, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and Latin America and the Caribbean have experienced an increase in PM2.5 concentrations over the past 20 years, driven in part by increased wildfires.
Annual PM2.5 concentrations and high PM2.5 days in Europe and North America have declined due to tightening regulations.
Fine particulates consist of soot from vehicles, smoke and ash from forest fires and pollution from biomass cooking stoves, as well as sulfate aerosols from power generation and desert dust.
The article also points out how levels of fine particles vary with the seasons, reflecting human activities that are accelerating air pollution.
For example, northeast China and northern India recorded higher PM 2.5 concentrations from December to February, likely due to increased use of fossil fuel-fired heat generators during the winter months.
On the other hand, South American countries such as Brazil experienced an increase in concentration between August and September, probably related to slash-and-burn tillage during the summer season.
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