UAE breathes cleaner air, as levels of major pollutant fall

Country has risen 10 places in international air quality rankings, report finds

Blue skies and clear waters at Heritage Village along the Corniche in Abu Dhabi. The UAE has cut levels of small particulates by more than a fifth in the past year. Victor Besa / The National

Levels of a major pollutant in the UAE's air have dropped significantly in a year, according to a report that ranks countries by air quality.

While concentrations of the smallest type of particulate matter remain above levels recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the 2024 World Air Quality Report from Swiss company IQAir reveals that they have fallen by more than a fifth.

As a result of the improvement, the UAE is now ranked 17th globally in terms of countries with the worst air pollution, an improvement of 10 places since the 2023 report, which focuses on levels of PM2.5 or particulate matter up to 2.5 micrometres in diameter.

“In 2024, air quality in West Asia [which includes the Middle East] showed moderate improvements, with PM2.5 levels dropping in each country across the region, although air pollution remains a significant challenge,” the report said. “The United Arab Emirates and Kuwait saw the most notable reductions in PM2.5 concentrations, with the UAE experiencing a 22 per cent drop and Kuwait a 24 per cent reduction.”

The UAE’s concentration of PM2.5 has fallen from 43 µg/m3 (micrograms per cubic metre) to 33.7 µg/m3 in a year. The WHO recommends a maximum of 5 µg/m3, a figure met by just seven of the 138 countries analysed in the report.

Public transport makes its mark

Habiba Al Marashi, chairwoman of Emirates Environmental Group, said that the authorities in every emirate monitored air quality and that multiple steps had been taken to achieve improvements. She indicated that slight reductions in the amount of traffic may have contributed to the UAE’s better performance.

“The increased use of public transport has helped,” she told The National. “Even putting the [Salik] toll on the main streets has helped in reducing it a little bit. Maybe it deters people from making unnecessary trips.”

Smart transport technologies make route-finding more efficient and “reduce wasted time and unnecessary routes”, Ms Al Marashi said. Another factor is the “increased number of trees that are being planted” and the growth in green space.

The ability of parks and gardens to cut air pollution has been established by research, with a study from China in 2023 finding that more green space “significantly decreases the PM2.5 concentration”.

Other research published this year suggested that an increase in the area covered by parks and gardens may have caused a slight reduction in Dubai’s temperatures.

Other Gulf nations have PM2.5 levels between 25 and 32 µg/m3, while Iraq is West Asia's most polluted country, with a figure of 38.4 µg/m3.

Diana Francis, who heads the Environmental and Geophysical Sciences Lab at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, said that, since 2010, the UAE had experienced a decrease in the levels in the air of aerosols – all types of dust and pollution. “Changes in land cover use and more built environment is the major contributor to these trends, in addition to the increase in rainfall, which helps to clean the air of suspended particles.” she said.

The 10 most polluted countries in the world. Credit: IQAir

More to be done

However, Dr Francis said that while there may have been falls in the levels of particulate matter, this cannot be said of gaseous pollutants such as carbon monoxide, ozone and nitrogen oxides.

“Stricter policies on pollutant emissions need to be put in place given the big negative impact of these pollutants on human health and crop health,” she said. “We still see on our roads trucks and buses that emit huge black smoke clouds, for example. The same goes for cruise [ships] docked at the ports. There are still many areas where improvements can be introduced.”

The small size of PM2.5 mean that they reach into the deepest part of the lungs and can enter the bloodstream. Short and long-term health effects, including heart disease, lung cancer and diabetes, are linked to the pollutants.

“When the air pollution is quite high, we notice a lot of hospital admissions because of chronic lung disease and heart attacks. Chest infections and asthma attacks are more common, especially when pollution is very high,” said Kamran Siddiqi, a medical doctor and professor in public health at the University of York in the UK.

The most polluted countries in the world are Chad, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and India, which have PM2.5 concentrations of between 50 and 92 µg/m3. In Central and South Asia nearly one-third of cities have average PM2.5 concentrations more than 10 times the maximum recommended by the WHO, the report said.

“While governments have implemented measures to curb pollution, challenges persist due to policy enforcement gaps, rapid urbanisation, and the continued reliance on polluting fuel sources,” it said.

How to improve

Prof Siddiqi said that in South Asia, in addition to pollution from traffic and industry, the burning by farmers of stubble in fields was a major pollution source. “It’s particularly a problem in Punjab, which covers both India and Pakistan,” he said. “In Bangladesh, it’s primarily fumes coming out of factories and traffic.”

He said that enforcing laws banning stubble burning was difficult, because the activity happened over a wide area. But, he noted that some cities in the region were trying to clean their air by, for example, introducing electric buses. Emerging technology also allows individuals to measure their exposure which helps people to travel on routes or at times of day that are less polluted, he said.

Bharat Pankhania, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter Medical School in the UK, said that many health issues caused by air pollution took a long time to emerge and that poorer people were often most heavily exposed.

“Many of the developing nations of the world have a younger-age population,” he said. “With that younger-age population exposed to high levels of air pollution, there are problems to come many decades on. The problems of air pollution are not necessarily immediate. You will have in future more people with illness because they've been exposed to that pollution when they were younger. It's imperative that national and local governments do all they can to improve air quality.”

Chart of the Week: Countries with the worst air pollution