By HONG KONG — U.S. embassies and consulates have stopped monitoring air quality abroad, ending a program that had provided essential public health data for more than a decade.
The State Department said its collection of air pollution data at more than 60 U.S. embassies and consulates around the world had been suspended as of Tuesday due to “budget constraints.”
“The current budget climate requires us to make difficult cuts,” a spokesperson said. “Unfortunately, we cannot continue to publish this data.”
The announcement follows the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal workers offering environment-related services last week.
The air quality data had been published on AirNow, a website run by the Environmental Protection Agency, and ZephAir, a mobile app managed by the State Department.
The website was offline as of Wednesday, while data is no longer available on the app for numerous cities including China’s Beijing, India’s Mumbai and Thailand’s Bangkok, all of which were among the world’s most polluted cities on Wednesday according to IQAir, a Swiss air quality-monitoring company.
Outdoor air pollution caused an estimated 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2019, according to the World Health Organization, most of them in low- and middle-income countries where residents lack access to reliable air quality data.
A 2022 study found that air-quality monitoring by U.S. embassies “significantly” lowered pollutant levels in host cities and raised local awareness of environmental issues.
The program has been “incredibly important” for regions of the world without access to “high-quality, timely and credible monitoring,” said Andrea La Nauze, co-author of the study and an associate professor who specializes in environmental economics at Deakin University in Australia.
The data led to improvements in local air quality, resulting in an average of 303 fewer premature deaths in each city and generating $127 million per year in savings associated with lower mortality, she said in an email.
The study noted ancillary evidence that the monitoring program and the resulting improvements in air quality reduced costs for the State Department, which provides diplomats and other overseas employees with hazard pay if they are working in highly polluted places.
Monitoring began in 2008 with a pilot program at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, where a device installed on its rooftop recorded levels of PM2.5, an air pollutant associated with premature mortality and heart attacks. The readings were then shared in real time online.
The program made international headlines in 2010 when its PM2.5 reading for Beijing surged past 500, about 20 times the upper limit recommended by the World Health Organization, in what the embassy labeled “crazy bad” pollution.
“The U.S. global air quality monitoring program provided an independent data source to help us understand the air pollution situation in Beijing during the time period,” said Steve Hung-Lam Yim, director of the Centre for Climate Change and Environmental Health at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Though the program initially drew the ire of the Chinese government, the U.S. embassy’s hourly release of data compelled China to set up its own PM2.5 monitoring system in its capital in 2011.
“I’ve never seen an initiative of the U.S. government have such an immediate, dramatic impact in a country,” Gary Locke, the U.S. ambassador to China from 2011 to 2014, was quoted as saying in 2013.
China has since acknowledged that Beijing was experiencing “persistent, large-scale, high-concentration severe air pollution.” In 2014, Chinese authorities announced that the country would launch a “war against pollution.”
Over the following years, the city of Beijing promoted alternatives to smog-producing coal and shut down more than 2,600 manufacturing companies associated with pollution, among other measures. A U.N. report in 2019 described Beijing’s progress as “outstanding,” praising its air pollution control policies as a “model.”
A senior Chinese environmental official said last month that China aimed to effectively eliminate severe air pollution by the end of this year, according to Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency.
The U.S. monitoring program also served as an “independent reference” to assess the reliability of air quality data collected by various nations, Yim said.
Having valid air quality data, he said, is important for studies examining the connection between air quality and health.
“Even [when] we have health data, we cannot fully understand the associations between various diseases and air pollutants if air quality data is missing,” he said.
“Given the foreseeable changing climate, air pollution may get worse,” he added.
