Singapore and Kuala Lumpur’s air is bad, but not the worst in the worldpublished at 07:27 BST
07:27 BST
Kelly Ng
Reporting from Singapore
Several reports have emerged, on news outlets and social media platforms, that Singapore is the city with the worst air quality in the world right now.
While it’s true that the air pollution here is quite bad, this characterisation may be misleading.
Most of these reports are attributed to IQAir, a real-time monitoring platform which currently has Singapore on top of its “most polluted global major city ranking”, with an air quality index (AQI) of 217.
Malaysia’s capital city Kuala Lumpur comes close in second place with an index of 210.
IQAir’s fine print, however, defines this as a ranking of “approximately 120 major cities [including] some of the largest and most well-known metropolises around the world” – which makes this a subset of the world’s cities.
Image source, IQAir
A separate monitoring platform AQI.In, which uses a similar air quality index as IQAir, has Sampit and Palangkaraya, two cities in Indonesia’s Kalimantan region, on the top of its “real-time most polluted cities in the world” ranking.
This would make sense given that Kalimantan is where many of the wildfires have originated, and are still burning.
In Sampit, the AQI is at a “hazardous” level of 334, while in Palangkaraya the index is at 297, in the “severe” range, according to AQI.In.
This list contains 250 of the world’s most polluted cities, regardless of their size.
Image source, AQI.in