US, Canada had highest air pollution surge worldwide in 2023: Report
The United States and Canada endured the planet’s biggest air pollution surge in 2023 — an upswing driven by the northern neighbor’s worst wildfire season on record, a report found.
Canada alone experienced its highest levels of fine particulate pollution (PM 2.5) in at least 26 years, with more than half of residents exposed to contaminant concentrations that surpassed national standards, according to the report.
The data, released as an annual update to the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index , showed that if these levels persist, people’s lives could be cut short by more than two years, compared to if they were living in air quality conditions that met World Health Organization guidelines.
“When fossil fuels are burned, they cause particulate air pollution right away,” Michael Greenstone, an economics professor at the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute and the cocreator of the index, said in a statement.
“There are more wildfires because fossil fuels also lead to higher temperatures, and the result is a second wave of air pollution,” he added.
As for the U.S., Greenstone and his colleagues determined the fires contributed amounts of air pollution that the country had not seen in more than a decade. Compared to just the year before, particulate pollution levels rose nationwide by an average of 20 percent, the data showed.
The resultant pollution from the Canadian blazes spread across Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio and even reached as far as Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Mississippi, according to the report. Counties in these states, the authors found, replaced many in California as the top 10 national pollution hot spots for the first time in five years.
“We are now stuck living with air pollution concentrations that are the dangerous ghost of the fossil fuels burned since the Industrial Revolution,” Greenstone said.