131 million Americans live in areas with unhealthy air pollution: Research

More than 131 million Americans are exposed to unhealthy levels of air pollution, according to the American Lung Association’s (ALA) 2024 State of the Air report.

The annual report, published Wednesday, found 131.2 million Americans live in areas assigned failing grades for particle or ozone pollution. This number — about 39 percent of Americans — is nearly 12 million more than the total reported last year.

Researchers assigned U.S. counties a grade on three measures: ozone pollution levels, short-term particle pollution levels and year-round particle pollution levels.

The report indicated that, in a continuation of long-term trends, people of color are disproportionately vulnerable to air pollution. While they comprise just more than 41 percent of the overall U.S. population, they represent 52 percent of residents of counties that received a failing grade on at least one of the measures. It also found that 63 percent of the 44 million people living in counties with failing grades on all three measures were people of color. They were overall more than twice as likely as white Americans to live in a country that failed all three measures.

Of the 10 cities with the worst year-round particle pollution, six were in California: Bakersfield, Visalia, the Fresno-Madera-Hanford area, the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland area, the Los Angeles-Long Beach area and the Sacramento-Roseville area. The other four were the Eugene-Springfield, Ore., area; the Medford-Grants Pass, Ore., area; the Phoenix-Mesa, Ariz., area; and Fairbanks, Alaska.

Researchers further found that while ozone pollution continues to affect more Americans than any other single pollutant, the number of Americans exposed fell for the fourth year in a row. The association attributes the downward trend to several factors, including the implementation of the Clean Air Act and the transition away from coal-fired power plants.

The number of residents in counties receiving failing grades for ozone pollution fell by 2.4 million in the past year, according to the report. Despite the positive trend, the ALA found that about 10 percent fewer counties earned A grades for levels of ozone pollution compared to 2023, while the number of counties with F grades remained flat.