Many New Yorkers are currently wearing face masks again. This time, however, the fabric is not intended to protect against a virus, but against the smog that has descended on the city in recent days.
Air pollution is currently so severe that New York has become the city with the worst air quality in the world in recent days. This shows a current ranking. It was created by IQAir, a technology partner of the United Nations Environment Program from Switzerland.
According to IQAir, the air quality index in the American metropolis has deteriorated dramatically since last Monday.
On Wednesday, the index reached a value that has been labeled "dangerous".
While such smog is unusual for New York, it is part of everyday life, especially in South Asia. According to IQAir, Indian cities in particular have suffered from smog in recent years.
Smog can affect health in many ways. "You have to distinguish between acute and long-term effects," explains Claudia Mohr, a professor in the Department of Environmental Systems at ETH Zurich. In pollution episodes such as the one in New York, where the concentrations of various air pollutants are so high, acute effects on the respiratory and cardiovascular systems naturally play an important role.
Long-term effects are more difficult to quantify, Mohr continues, “because various factors such as socio-economic status, lifestyle and general health play a role and also influence each other”. There is no question that living in bad air negatively affects health - not just in the lungs, heart and circulatory system, but throughout the body - and increases the risk of a wide variety of diseases.
Israel's largest city has been battling smog from diesel engines in public transport buses for decades. Last fall, a bus stop was declared a pollution hotspot. Israel's environment minister has instructed the city to come up with a plan to improve the situation.
Coal is still used for heating in many places in Dhaka and construction activity is very brisk. The industry and the busy traffic in the crowded streets - the average speed in the streets of Dhaka is around 4.5 kilometers per hour - in turn cause a lot of particulate matter.
In addition, the city is low-lying, which means that particulate matter from adjacent, higher-lying areas accumulates here.
Despite government intervention, air pollution reached worrying levels again last December. As in Dhaka, the main sources of air pollution in Kolkata are traffic emissions, wood and coal burning, and construction.
As in New York, the fires in Canada are the cause of Detroit's current poor air quality. However, due to heavy industry, Detroit has poor air quality anyway, which is a major problem for the city.
Last winter, the southern Polish city of Krakow briefly topped the IQAir rating. The reason, apart from the city's trough-like topography, is that coal heating is widespread in Poland. In winter, a lot of particulate matter collects from all over the city.
Road traffic, lively construction activity and industry are also among the main causes of air pollution in the Vietnamese capital.
The air quality here gets particularly bad towards the end of autumn. Then the rice farmers had their fields burned down after the harvest.
In Delhi, too, the usual suspects - road traffic and industry - play a major role in air pollution. But the problem gets worse here, especially in the fall when farmers from surrounding Indian states set fire to their harvested fields.
Lahore was the city with the worst air quality in the world throughout 2022, according to a study by the World Health Organization. In addition to road traffic, the cause lies in the brick and textile industry, which cause particularly high levels of particulate matter.
The reason why the air in Algiers, the capital of Algeria, is currently not particularly clean sometimes reaches Europe: it is the Sahara dust. Under certain meteorological conditions it reaches Europe and then colors the sky above Switzerland yellowish. (aargauerzeitung.ch)
Soource :Watson
I am Amelia James, a passionate journalist with a deep-rooted interest in current affairs. I have more than five years of experience in the media industry, working both as an author and editor for 24 Instant News. My main focus lies in international news, particularly regional conflicts and political issues around the world.
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