For the second time in 2023, Kyiv was included in the ranking of 30 world capitals with the best air quality by the international service IQAir and ranked 22nd out of 114 capitals.
The city is in the "green zone" with an annual PM2.5 dust concentration of 8.9 mg/m3, the KMDA press service reports.
It is noted that in 2022, the annual concentration of PM2.5 dust in the city reached 9.5 mg/m3. Kyiv was ranked alongside such capitals as Vienna (Austria), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Copenhagen (Denmark), and others.
"It's nice that for the second year in a row Kyiv is among the thirty cities in the world with the cleanest air according to the international service IQAir. It is worth talking about the complex reason for this development," said Volodymyr Prokopiv, Deputy Head of the Kyiv City State Administration for Self-Government.
He explained that the reason for the improvement in air quality is:
- reduction of anthropogenic impact since the beginning of a full-scale war, namely a reduction in the number of polluting enterprises and cars on the roads;
- the addition of the city monitoring system from 2022 to the list of sources taken into account when calculating the world ranking of cities by air quality, which affected the objectivity of the report.
Oleksandr Vozniy, director of the Department of Environmental Protection and Adaptation to Climate Change of the KMDA, emphasized that during 2023, the overall level of air pollution in Kyiv was low or very low 90% of the time. This means that most of the time the people of Kyiv breathed clean air.
"Of course, as in any metropolis, in Kyiv from time to time there are periods when we record the deterioration of air quality," he said.
Vozny explained that the reasons for the deterioration of air quality can be various, for example:
- meteorological conditions;
- cross-border impact, that is, the consequences of dust storms raging hundreds of kilometers from Kyiv.
Kyiv has the largest automated air quality monitoring system in Ukraine with 46 indicative and 7 reference points. Air quality data is available online on the website of the Department of Environmental Protection and in the Kyiv Digital application.
The press service emphasized that Kyiv was among the cities with the most polluted air:
- New Delhi (India);
- Dhaka (Bangladesh);
- Baghdad (Iraq).
And with the cleanest air:
- San Juan (Puerto Rico);
- Wellington (New Zealand);
- Canberra (Australia).
Earlier, EcoPolitic wrote, that the annual IQAir report showed that in 2023, air quality in only seven out of 134 countries met the World Health Organization's recommendations for annual dust concentrations of PM2.5 to 5 µg/m3. Ukraine ranked 107th in the pollution ranking with an indicator of 8.6 µg/m3.
As EcoPolitic previously reported, in Kyiv, the air quality index, and thus the level of pollution, was low or very low for 87% of the time in 2023, i.e. about 10.5 months.
