Hong Kong – Embassies and consulates in the United States have stopped monitoring air quality abroad, finishing a program that had provided essential public health data for more than a decade.
The State Department said that its compilation of air pollution data in more than 60 embassies and consulates from the United States worldwide had been suspended as of Tuesday due to “budget limitations.”
“The current budget climate requires that we make difficult cuts,” said a spokesman. “Unfortunately, we cannot continue publishing this data.”
The announcement follows the mass dismissals of federal workers of the Trump administration that offer services related to the environment last week.
Air quality data were published on Airnow, a website led by the Environmental Protection Agency, and Zephair, a mobile application managed by the State Department.
The website was offline until Wednesday, while the data is no longer available in the application for numerous cities, including Beijing from China, Mumbai of India and Bangkok in Thailand, all of which were among the most contaminated cities in the world on Wednesday according to Iqair, a company of quality of the Swiss air quality.
Outdoor air pollution caused an estimate of 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2019, according to the World Health Organization, most of them in low and medium -sized countries where residents lack access to reliable air quality data.
A 2022 study found that the monitoring of air quality by the embassies of the United States “significantly” reduced pollutant levels in host cities and increased local awareness about environmental problems.
The program has been “incredibly important” for the regions of the world without access to “high quality, timely and credible monitoring,” said Andrea La Nauze, co -author of the study and an associate teacher who specializes in environmental economy at the University of Deakin in Australia.
The data led to improvements in local air quality, which resulted in an average of 303 premature deaths in each city and generated $ 127 million per year in savings associated with lower mortality, he said in an email.
The study observed auxiliary evidence that the monitoring program and the resulting improvements in air quality reduce costs for the State Department, which provides diplomats and other employees abroad for a risks payment if they are working in highly contaminated places.
The monitoring began in 2008 with a pilot program at the United States Embassy in Beijing, where a device installed at its registered levels on the roof of PM2.5, an air pollutant associated with premature mortality and heart attacks. The readings were shared in real time online.
The program reached international headlines in 2010 when its PM2.5 reading for Beijing increased more than 500, approximately 20 times the upper limit recommended by the World Health Organization, in which the embassy described the “crazy” pollution.
“The US Global Air Quality Monitoring program provided an independent data source to help us understand the situation of air pollution in Beijing during the period of time,” said Steve Hung-Mlam Yim, director of the Center for Climate Change and Environmental Health of the Nanyang Technology University in Singapore.
Although the program initially caused the anger of the Chinese government, the release of data per hour from the United States embassy forced China to establish its own PM2.5 monitoring system in its capital in 2011.
“I have never seen that an initiative of the United States government has such an immediate and dramatic impact on a country,” said Gary Locke, the United States ambassador to China from 2011 to 2014, he said in 2013.
Since then, China has recognized that Beijing was experiencing “persistent, large -scale and high concentration.” In 2014, the Chinese authorities announced that the country would launch a “war on pollution.”
In the following years, the city of Beijing promoted alternatives to Smog -producing coal and closed more than 2,600 manufacturing companies associated with pollution, among other measures. A UN report in 2019 described Beijing’s progress as “outstanding”, praising its air pollution control policies as a “model.”
A senior Chinese environmental official said last month that China was aimed at effectively eliminating severe air pollution for the end of this year, according to Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency.
The United States monitoring program also served as an “independent reference” to evaluate the reliability of air quality data collected by several nations, Yim said.
Having valid air quality data, he said, is important for studies that examine the connection between air quality and health.
“Even [when] We have health data, we cannot completely understand the associations between several diseases and air pollutants if air quality data are missing, ”he said.
“Given the expected changing climate, air pollution can get worse,” he added.
