In the United States, smoke from wildfires is undoing progress from the Clean Air Act. In poorer countries, the situation is even worse.
By Delger Erdenesanaa and Noah Weiland, The New York Times
On the heels of an exceptionally fiery and smoky summer, two new reports released Wednesday confirmed what many Americans have been already seeing and breathing.
Smoke from increasingly frequent and increasingly large fires has started to undo decades of hard-won gains in air quality, and the problem is expected to only get worse, not just in the United States but also around the world.
More than two billion people were exposed to at least a day of fire-related air pollution each year between 2010 and 2019, a report from researchers in Australia found. And in the United States, wildfires have undone about 25 percent of past progress in cleaning up air pollution in states from coast to coast.
“People have known that it’s becoming a bigger issue in the Western states,” said Marissa Childs, a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment and a co-author of the study that focused on the United States. “But I was really shocked when we were running some of these estimates and seeing that states all the way to the East Coast were being influenced.”
Read the full article at The New York Times.