Air pollution spiked after the Trump administration stopped embassy monitoring
A study published in PNAS indicates that air pollution levels in various countries rose by 24-33% after the Trump administration discontinued a U.S. embassy air quality monitoring program. Environmental economists suggest that the public availability of this data was crucial for raising awareness and improving air quality in low- and middle-income nations.
Why it matters
The findings highlight the tangible public health consequences of withdrawing international environmental monitoring initiatives.
Growing up in Shanghai in the early 1990s, Eric Zou remembers the air.
"I lived a couple of miles next to a chemical plant and it was just really bad, really foggy," he says. "It's the middle of the day, but you can't see the sun."
Intensive industrial activity blanketed many cities in China during the 1990s and 2000s with extremely hazardous air . But Zou, now an environmental economist at the University of Michigan, says that many people didn't really understand this smog as air pollution, or something that could harm them.
"When you have a big smog event, people often talk about that as fog, they think it was just like bad weather," says Zou. One big key to changing that sentiment, he says, was information initially provided by the United States.
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