(NEXSTAR) — Air quality was a top concern for many across the country during the summer of 2023, when many cities and entire states were blanketed in smokey Canadian wildfire skies. As it turns out, that smoky infiltration may have bolstered some U.S. cities to rank among the world’s most polluted.
In a new report, IQAir ranked more than 7,800 locations worldwide based on data collected from thousands of air quality monitoring stations.
The U.S., as a whole, ranked as one of the less-polluted countries when it came to air quality, coming in as 102nd out of 134 total countries. At 79.9 µg/m3 (a unit of measurement for air pollution), Bangladesh was ranked as the most polluted — that annual number is 15 times higher than the World Health Organization’s annual PM2.5 guideline (5 µg/m3 or less) and almost nine times higher than the U.S.
IQAir also ranked nearly 3,000 cities based on their annual average PM2.5 …