Is Your Air Safe? - Global Air Quality by Dan Shepherd

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was when I read this key fact, “In 2019, 99% of the world’s population was living in places where the World Health Organization (WHO) air quality guidelines levels were not met.” One of things that all of humanity seems to have in common is air pollution. 6.7 million premature deaths worldwide every year are associated with the combine effects air pollution, according to the WHO. I wanted to use my data visualization skills to raise awareness of this global problem. Advances in air pollution tracking mechanisms have produced countless troves of detailed data that can be endlessly distracting. The WHO has five risk categories for Unsafe Air: low, moderate, high, very high and hazardous. But there is only one category for Safe Air, no/minor risk. I wanted to simplify the data story to basic idea of safe air versus unsafe air. I am sure we can all agree that everyone deserves access to safe air. Often when faced with a dilemma we try to make sense of a bad situation by categorizing the negative in terms of relative degrees. We might ask ourselves, “Ok, my air is unsafe but how unsafe?” Perhaps your Unsafe Air is a high risk, and you tell yourself, “At least its not worse.” This is normal and its human, but this often moderates our perception of the risk and can make behavior change harder when trying to tackle difficult environmental problems. We can easily get bogged down in the data and specificity which are vital to implementing a solution but can be very distracting and overwhelming for the early efforts of understanding and awareness. Start simple, engage at a high level, and try to create a connection to the scope of the problem – that is the goal of this data visualization. I prepped an excellent data set from a World Bank working paper with country-based population exposure levels to air pollution (the reference link is in the data viz info pop-up) and utilized my preferred data analysis tool, Tableau, to ask a straightforward question: Does the majority of each country’s population have access to Safe Air? Turns out that only 1% of the world’s population live in a country where this is true! 99% of humans on earth live in a country where the majority of its citizens don’t have access to Safe Air. Even worse, nearly 3.5 billion people live in countries where the majority breathe hazardous air, the highest risk unsafe air category. Access to safe air should be a human right and not a privilege. We can and should do better. This viz also includes a link to a global map live IQAir air pollution data where you can track the quality of the air in your location. Think globally, act locally.