Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Estonia, Granada, New Zealand and Iceland were among the countries where the average annual PM2.5 index did not exceed 5 micrograms per cubic meter, which corresponds to the standards established by WHO.
The most polluted countries were Chad, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and India. In 2024, the level of PM2.5 in all five countries was at least 10 times higher than the maximum permissible standards, and in Chad it exceeded the recommended levels by 18 times.
In this 2024 ranking, Tajikistan ranked 6th (46.3), Uzbekistan 19th (31.4), Turkmenistan 26th (26.5), Kyrgyzstan 41st (21.1) and Kazakhstan 71st (15.1).
"Only 17% of the world's cities meet the WHO air pollution standards. The Indian city of Birnihat became the most polluted in 2024 with an average annual concentration of PM2.5 128.2 micrograms per cubic meter, the publication notes. "The Central and South Asian region has seven of the most polluted cities in the world, and India has six of the nine most polluted cities in the world."
Tashkent ranked 510th out of 8,954 cities in the world. The average level of PM2.5 in the previous year was 31.4 micrograms per cubic meter.
"Air pollution doesn't kill us right away - it takes two to three decades before we see its impact on health, unless it's very strong," says Frank Hammes, CEO of IQAir. "Avoiding this is one of those preventive measures that people don't think about until later."
