Indian Air Pollution Was Worse Than China's in 2015

By Angus Stewart

It’s 2014. The World Health Organization announces that the capital of a rising Asian power is the most polluted city in the world. The government denies the report and spends the next year cobbling together its own air quality data using faulty equipment and unscientific collection methods. The government declares that the main causes of urban air pollution are a mystery, and deregisters the national branch of Greenpeace just for good measure.

Where did this all happen? India of course.

For those who keep an eye on the data, it has been no secret that for years, Indian cities are the worst in the world for air pollution. The 2014 WHO report revealed that 13 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in India. Of the remaining seven cities, Pakistan laid claim to three, Bangladesh two, Iran and Qatar one each. China is conspicuously absent from the list.

Those of us previously unaware of ‘the data’ may be scratching our heads at this point. Fear not. A report published by Greenpeace in February 2016 sheds some light through the fog. The document’s bland title is coupled with a far more attention-grabbing subtitle: "2015 was the first time on record that the average Indian was exposed to more pollution than the average Chinese."

Greenpeace used observations from NASA satellites to gather data on China and India, the world’s two biggest air polluters. They would have preferred to use data collected on the ground, but justified their decision by pointing out that ground data currently covers just one quarter of Chinese citizens, and only a tiny percentage of people in India. Indian pollution reports, in particular, are pretty shambolic. For example, when India’s National Green Tribunal ordered India’s Union Transport Ministry to investigate air pollution in 2015, the Transport Ministry concluded only that vehicles were not a major cause. (How convenient). With zero answers to go on, India’s central government was forced to conclude that it does not know what is causing the rapid decline of air quality in New Dehli.

Declines and increases are the key themes of Greenpeace’s report. Their findings illustrate that air pollution in China was skyrocketing until 2011, when the Chinese government began working to enforce anti-pollution policies and targets. A one percent decrease in Chinese air pollution between 2011-2012 snowballed and led to 2015 being China’s best year on record. China’s dark mirror is India, which in 2015 faced its worst year on record.

The images below, taken from the Greenpeace report, show Asia in 2005, 2011, and 2015. You can see that China has ‘exported’ much of its pollution from the Chinese Midwest to the Chinese Northeast, while India has continued to expand its industrial North. 

2005

2011

2015

An extremely telling fourth image from the report illustrates pollution levels by percent increase or decrease:

[Images via The Hindu, qz.com]

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