Johannesburg's Air Quality Problem
This article examines the air quality crisis in Johannesburg, noting that while data is available, it is not consistently reported to the public. It explains the Air Quality Index (AQI) and the health risks associated with fine particulate matter pollution.
Why it matters
Public awareness of air quality is essential for mitigating respiratory and cardiovascular health risks in rapidly urbanizing regions.
Air quality can be measured, and the measures are regularly published in global cities. But this does not happen to the same degree in South Africa, even though the data are available. The data for Johannesburg are alarming and sufficiently dangerous to trigger a host of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases as well as cancers.
The most common measure is the air quality index (AQI), a measurement system used to translate levels of air pollution into a simple number that indicates the potential health risk posed by the air people are breathing. Instead of reporting only the concentration of individual pollutants, such as the amount of fine particulate matter in the air, the AQI converts these measurements into a scale, where higher numbers represent increasingly dangerous conditions.
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