Air pollution: Nearly everyone in Europe breathing bad air
With the EU voting on new air quality rules, satellite data shows that 98% of people face pollution above limits recommended by the World Health Organization.
Virtually everyone in Europe lives in polluted towns and cities where annual average levels of fine particulate matter are higher than the World Health Organization's (WHO) recommended limit.
In practical terms, this means that almost everyone on the continent is breathing bad air that has been shown to be fatal.
Air pollution increases the risk of respiratory and heart disease and lowers life expectancy.
"With the current levels of air pollution, many people [are getting] sick. We know that lowering air pollution levels reduces these numbers," said Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, director of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).
How bad is air pollution in Europe?
DW partnered with the European Data Journalism Network to analyze satellite data from the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS).
We found that in 2022, almost everyone in Europe — 98% of people — lived in areas where the concentration of fine particulate matter, commonly abbreviated as PM 2.5, was over the limit set by the WHO.
The WHO recommends that the annual average concentration of fine particulate pollution should not exceed five micrograms per cubic meter of air. A microgram is a thousand times less than a milligram.
Pollution levels differ from region to region in Europe. It can be especially severe in parts of Central Europe, the Po valley in Italy and in larger metropolitan areas, such as Athens, Barcelona and Paris.
Our analysis shows that the most polluted regions in Europe reach annual average PM 2.5 concentrations of about 25 micrograms per cubic meter.
High air pollution levels for individual European cities have been reported before, but this new data analysis offers a first Europe-wide comparison of pollution in different regions. We show where air quality has improved and where it's gotten worse.
We also used the data to identify two places with similar problems but a different outlook. In northern Italy, pollution levels are high and seem to remain so. In southern Poland, they are also high yet appear to be falling. We looked at how mitigation strategies are helping or not.
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