Do you know how many super polluters are on your doorstep? A first-of-its kind tool, from a group backed by former vice president and climate activist Al Gore, wants to show you just that. And the answer may be horrifying.
The groundbreaking interactive map, launched this week, allows residents of cities around the world to track their exposure to dangerous air pollution and pinpoint their area’s biggest offenders.
The tool shows users how plumes of particulate matter and other harmful pollution – represented in bright orange – spew from numerous facilities and stretch for miles, far beyond the sources.
New York made the top-ten list of most polluted cities, coming in at number four after Karachi, Pakistan; Guangzhou, China; and Seoul, South Korea. The tool flags 124 facilities across all five boroughs, exposing 16.7 million residents to toxic pollution.
“Facilities that burn fossil fuels are the overwhelmingly dominant source of heat-trapping pollution that is driving the climate crisis – by using the sky as if it were an open sewer,” Gore said in a statement, adding that the tool was “a call to action” for policymakers.
“Our leaders must do something to reduce it,” he urged.
The emissions come from power plants, shipping and manufacturing sites, mines, and oil refineries, according to Climate TRACE, a coalition of scientists, AI specialists, and NGOs, who created the tool. In all, some 660 million sources of emissions are mapped across 2,500 urban areas in 252 countries.
The orange plumes represent harmful particulate matter, known as PM2.5, that can aggravate asthma, cause heart attacks, and lead to premature death for people with heart or lung disease.
Air pollution causes 200,000 early deaths each year in the United States, according to MIT. There are 9 million deaths globally due to air pollution each year.
The tool also tracks carbon, nitrous oxide, and sulfur dioxide, some of the main planet-cooking pollutants that are fueling a global climate crisis of hotter temperatures, drought, crop die-offs and extreme weather disasters.
“Many people have long known that they live in the shadow of major emitters, and these global data only validate and quantify what those communities have been saying,” Gavin McCormick, co-founder of Climate TRACE, said. “But in other cases, dangerous pollution – and exactly who is causing it – can be surprisingly invisible.”
More than half of the 1.6 billion people who live in areas exposed to the plumes are breathing in polluted air from super emitters – facilities in the top 10 percent of all PM2.5 sources, according to Climate TRACE.
Some of the worst air pollution was in Asia. Karachi, a bustling metropolis in Pakistan that is often smoggy due to industrial pollution, topped the list with 18.4 million people in harm’s way.
Climate TRACE also spotlights other American cities frequently exposed to pollution. In and around oil-laden Houston, Texas, four million people breathe in pollution from 138 refineries and other facilities. And in LA, 3.8 million people are blanketed with pollution from shipping ports and 90 emitting sources.
The researchers also focused on Louisiana’s so-called “Cancer Alley.” Communities, that are largely poor and Black, living near a glut of oil and petrochemical plants have reported elevated numbers of cancer cases each year, according to researchers at Tulane University.
If Cancer Alley were a nation, it would have the fourth-highest emissions per person in the world, behind the major oil producers Qatar, Turkmenistan, and Bahrain, Climate TRACE said.
Exposure to any air pollution has been tied cancer, stroke, and lung and heart disease, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Researchers have also tied exposure to an increased risk of dementia.
The health of children, the elderly, people with respiratory conditions, and people who work outside is disproportionately affected by high levels of air pollution.
To learn more about health impacts, the Climate TRACE teams plan to make the tool more granular so that pollution can be viewed at a neighborhood level.
“When it’s over in their homes and in their neighborhoods and when people have a very clear idea of this, then I think they’re empowered with the truth of their situation,” Gore told The Associated Press. “My faith tradition has always taught me you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
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