Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Canada air is some of the cleanest in the world, at least on average

According to the annual air quality index produced by Swiss air quality tech company IQAir, Canada has some of the world's cleanest air.

Canada's air is only beaten by that of Iceland, New Zealand, Estonia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, US Virgin Islands, New Caledonia and Puerto Rico. We handily beat out the likes of the US, the UK, and the rest of Europe (outside of Scandinavia).

Down at the bottom of the list are perennial Asian offenders Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Mongolia and Afghanistan.

That said, I do wonder how we would have fared with just the southern, more populated areas of the country taken into consideration. The study averages out PM2.5 (fine particulate matter) readings reported by ground-based monitoring stations across 106 countries throughout the world. I assume that Canada has such monitoring stations in its more remote reaches as well as in the populated south, which perhaps gives a rather skewed impression. But, hey, I'll take it.

No comments: