Gasp! Air pollution in Jakarta and Hanoi is now worse than in Beijing, global study reveals

(Eco Business, 25 Feb 2020) While air quality in China improves, Southeast Asia’s air is becoming less breathable as a result of urbanisation, coal burning and forest fires. Nowhere is the air as suffocating as South Asia, but there are signs of improvement in India and Pakistan, as policymakers start to respond to the world’s single biggest public health threat.

While the air in China—the world’s biggest carbon emitter and polluter—is fast getting cleaner, Southeast Asia’s air is becoming markedly less breathable for the regional bloc of 655 million people, an annual study of air pollution dominated by Asia’s rapidly developing economies has revealed.

Jakarta and Hanoi have overtaken Beijing, the world’s most suffocating capital just a few years ago, in the 2019 World Air Quality Report by IQAir AirVisual, the world’s largest air quality monitoring network, which uses data from governments, companies, civic society groups and citizen measuring devices.

The air in the Indonesian and Vietnamese capitals is now 20 per cent more polluted than China’s capital city, which has introduced radical policies to improve air quality in recent years.

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Eco Business, 25 Feb 2020: Gasp! Air pollution in Jakarta and Hanoi is now worse than in Beijing, global study reveals