Nearly 40% in US live in areas with unhealthy pollution: Report
- 131.2 million US residents live in areas with unhealthy pollution levels
- People of color are 2.3 times as likely to live with unhealthy air quality
- Climate change makes cleaning up air quality more difficult
A cyclist wears a mask due to poor air quality conditions as smoke from wildfires in Ontario and Quebec hangs over Ottawa on Tuesday, June 6, 2023. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP)
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(NewsNation) — Nearly 4 in 10 U.S. residents live in places with unhealthy levels of air pollution, according to the American Lung Association (ALA).
Despite decades of progress in cleaning up air pollution, the 2024 State of the Air report found that between 2020 and 2022, 39% of people living in America — 131.2 million people — lived in areas with unhealthy levels of air pollution. That percentage increased by 11.7 million since last year’s report.
According to the report, the increase is due to extreme heat, drought, and wildfires “contributing to a steady increase in deadly particle pollution, especially in the western U.S.”
The report found that most of the 119 counties earning failing grades for year-round particle pollution are in the Western U.S. However, the new standard found remaining air quality problems in Eastern and Midwestern states.
The 2024 report revealed 47 counties in 12 states east of the Mississippi River had “unhealthy year-round levels of fine particles.”
The report highlights that living with unhealthy air isn’t shared equally. People of color were 2.3 times as likely as white people to live in a country with three facility grades, the report found.
The State of the Air report reviews two dangerous air pollutions, fine particles and ozone utilizing air quality data collected by official monitoring sites used by federal, state, local, and Tribal governments. The 2024 edition marks the 25th anniversary of the annual report and includes air quality during the COVID-19 pandemic.
