The pausing of a United States-funded air quality monitoring programme has weakened access to critical AQ data in 44 countries, including Bangladesh, according to an article by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Finland-based think tank.
The suspension comes at a time when Dhaka is consistently finding it among the cities with the worst air quality in the World Air Quality Index.
The think tank warns that unless these countries build up their independent, regulatory-grade air quality monitoring capacity, there could be severe repercussions for public health, policymaking and environmental regulation, said a CREA press release issued on Wednesday.
For years, the US government had supported regulatory-grade air quality monitors at its embassies worldwide, including in Dhaka, providing real-time data on harmful particulate matter (PM2.5) through the AirNow platform run by the US State Department.
These devices became essential tools in countries with limited local monitoring capacity, especially in regions suffering from chronic air pollution.
However, the CREA release said that the system abruptly ceased operations on March 4, 2025, due to funding constraints that led to the discontinuation of the AirNow international data service, leaving several nations, including some of the world鈥檚 most polluted, without any reliable means to monitor or respond to their worsening air quality.
Ahmad Kamruzzaman Majumder, founder and director at the Centre for Atmospheric Pollution Studies, said that until recently, data from the US embassy played a key role in assessing air quality, but for the past month that information was unavailable, leaving the public without accurate data, making it harder for the government to make informed decisions, and limiting experts鈥� ability to assess the situation, which increases the risk of worsening air pollution.
The CREA鈥檚 analysis reveals that six countries have completely lost their ability to monitor air quality, while 28 countries have lost access to government-grade data, and 16 countries now need urgent reassessment of their monitoring infrastructure.
For 13 countries, including Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, the US embassy鈥檚 monitoring station was the sole source of regulatory-grade air quality data.
In Bangladesh, updates published regularly by the Department of Environment are also a source of information on air quality.
