Air pollution improving overall in U.S., disproportionately impacting the West, people of color

About 1 in 4 people in the United States – more than 119 million residents – live with air pollution that can hurt their health and shorten their lives, according to a new report (Source: “A quarter of Americans live with polluted air, with people of color and those in Western states disproportionately affected, report says,” CNN, April 19).

The report found that there were improvements in air quality overall. Generally, 17.6 million fewer people were breathing unhealthy air than in last year’s report, due largely to falling levels of ozone in some regions. Around 25% more counties got an A grade in the report for lower levels of ozone pollution.

However, the report also found that the number of people living in counties with failing grades for daily spikes of particle pollution was the highest it has been in a decade.

One driver of the high amounts of particle pollution are the wildfires that have consumed hundreds of thousands of acres. Those fires are why the regions with the highest concentrations of air pollution are largely in the West. 

Not everyone experiences pollution the same way in the U.S. Regardless of the region, communities of color bear the brunt of the problem. Specifically, although people of color make up 41% of the overall U.S. population, they are 54% of the nearly 120 million people living in counties with at least one failing grade for unhealthy air. And in the counties with the worst air quality, 72% of the 18 million residents are people of color, the report said.

Earlier this year, HPIO released a Health Value Dashboard fact sheet titled “A Closer Look at Outdoor Air Pollution and Health” that focuses on the importance of clean air and provides additional information on the outdoor air quality metric in the Dashboard.