IQAir World Air Quality Report 2022: Malaysia is 9.6% better, but exceeds WHO guidelines by >300%
The air in the world is alarmingly polluted IQAir World Air Quality Report 2022and only 13 countries/regions in the world surpass the WHO recommended PM2.5 guideline value of 5 µg/m3.
The only 13 countries/regions out of a total of 131 countries in the report adopted are Finland, Estonia, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Australia, Grenade, New Caledonia, Iceland, Bonaire, Sint Eusatius and Saba, Bermuda, US Virgin Islands, French Polynesia and Guam.
Malaysia’s PM2.5 value is 17.7 µg/m3. To be precise, this is the average annual exposure value across all 62 monitoring stations in our country. In the ASEAN region, we are behind Cambodia, Singapore and the Philippines who are cleaner than we are. In that order, Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and Indonesia are inferior to us.
However, 17.7 is the average. Kuala Lumpur itself is 17.6, but things are much worse in other parts of the Klang Valley. Klang was pretty bad with 27.1, Petaling Jaya got 26.5. The only city in Malaysia to pass the WHO guidelines was Bongawan, in Sabah, which hit a record 4.7. While Malaysia’s 17.7 figure is a 9.6% improvement from the previous year, not all cities have become cleaner. The largest increase in PM2.5 occurred in Seremban, where concentrations increased 68% to 25.7 μg/m3.
Air pollution has a serious impact on health and, according to WHO, is the biggest environmental threat to human health. Every year, exposure to air pollution is estimated to cause 7 million premature deaths.
PM2.5, a fine particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less, is the most dangerous contaminant because it can penetrate the lung barrier and enter the blood system, causing cardiovascular disease, respiratory and cancer.
It is very important to eliminate PM2.5 emissions where people live. We’ve talked about this before in our previously published opinion piece.”Electric cars don’t emit zero emissions when electricity is generated by coal power plants, but so what?“
In 2013, a 9-year-old girl died of a severe asthma attack in the UK. She lives near a major road in south-east London. A coroner ruled that air pollution was the official cause of death, because she was exposed to levels of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter that exceeded WHO guidelines.
Her main source of exposure is traffic emissions. Her mother said that if it was said that air pollution contributed to her daughter’s illness, she would have moved. In the three years before her death, she had been in and out of the hospital nearly 30 times.
While we are on a slow journey to move our vehicles to zero emissionsThere are other efforts the government can make to improve the air quality of our cities.
One low-hanging result was the introduction of an anti-idle law in Malaysia, which would ban vehicles from idling and sucking in ambient air.
There are plenty of internal combustion engines that are started every morning and left unloaded on the porch to “start up,” letting its exhaust seep into every house on the street where it’s parked. Many people also tend to relax in their cars while waiting for the engine to turn on to turn on the air conditioner. The same goes for the public transport buses that are waiting at the stops, the large diesel engines that do not work pollute the whole place for a long time. All of this should be stopped, it’s a waste of subsidized fuel and contributes to pollution.
IQAir took a positive note of harsher penalties for environmental polluters in Malaysia in their report, mentioning that the DOE announced an amendment to the Environmental Quality Act in 2022 to allowing increased penalties for polluters, including a provision clarifying regulations regarding outdoor burning.
Public burning is a common sight in Malaysia due to weak law enforcement
However, execution seems to be a real problem here. If you regularly travel up and down the Guthrie Corridor Expressway, you’ll almost certainly see huge plumes of smoke rising from behind the highway’s greenery. Outdoor burning seems to be practiced every day in Malaysia with no consequence.
Malaysia needs more efforts to improve PM2.5 levels in most of the cities in which we live, however IQAir notes that it will be difficult to do in one action as our PM2.5 is promoted. driven by many factors – increasing industrialization, vehicle emissions, outdoor burning, as well as transboundary haze caused by biomass burning and forest fires in neighboring countries.
However, a collaborative study by the Research Center for Clean Air and Energy and Greenpeace Malaysia has revealed that poor air quality is a likely cause of around 32,000 avoidable deaths. across the country every year. We need to work to save those 32,000 lives every year.
