What is the quality of air in New Delhi, Jakarta or Buenos Aires? By Tuesday, the United States embassy in these cities could tell you.
However, Trump’s administration has effectively closed a global air quality monitoring program, ending up over a decade of public data collection and reference from 80 embassies and consulates worldwide.
The information supported the survey, helped thousands of external employees work abroad to decide whether it was safe to let their children play outdoors, and directly led to improvements to air quality in countries such as China.
The Foreign Ministry said in an email that the program was suspended “due to budget restrictions”.
Health officials and environmental experts have said that the ending of air quality monitoring would harm Americans abroad, especially those working for the US government.
“Embassies are sometimes found in very difficult air quality conditions,” said Gina McCarthy, who led the environmental protection service in Obama’s administration.
This, along with John Kerry, who was then a foreign minister, expanded worldwide what was a limited but transformative attempt to monitor air in China.
“You can’t send people to dangerous areas without information,” Ms McCarthy said. “We generally think of dangerous areas as war zones or something. But it is equally important to consider whether their health worsens because they are in a place with such poor air quality.”
In 2008, United States officials in Beijing installed air quality screens on the roof of the US Embassy and eventually began publishing data on the levels of one of the most dangerous types of air pollutants, tiny particles known as PM 2.5. The particles can enter the lungs and blood and may be associated with respiratory problems, heart attacks and other serious health effects.
The information has revealed what the locals already knew: that pollution was much worse than the Chinese government would recognize.
“All hell broke,” Ms McCarthy recalled. The Chinese government has unsuccessfully tried to push the US Embassy to stop making the data publicly, calling on readings illegal and attacking the quality of science, others said.
Eventually, Chinese officials destroyed. They implemented their own monitoring system, increased the budget for pollution control and eventually began working with the United States on air quality projects.
In 2015, Ms McCarthy and Mr Kerry announced that they would extend air to US diplomatic missions, arguing that air pollution, such as climate change, required global data and solutions.
A 2022 study published in the process of the National Academy of Sciences found that when US embassies began to monitor local air pollution, the host countries take action. The study found that, since 2008, there were significant reductions in the levels of gathering fine particles in US -screen cities, resulting in a reduction in premature death for more than 300 million people.
Dan Westervelt, a research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, said many countries had no public monitoring of air quality and that the data from embassies provided researchers reliable information.
Dr. Westervelt said he worked in a project through the Foreign Ministry using embassies of embassies in five West African countries, but received a break when President Trump assumed duties in January.
“In my opinion it jeopardizes the health of foreign service officials,” he said. “But they also block the possible research and policy.”
The data had appeared in Airnow, a website managed by both EPA and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as Zephair, an application for mobiles run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On Tuesday the site was offline and no data was presented.
The Foreign Ministry said the air screens at the embassies will continue to run for an indefinite period of time, but would not send live data to the application or other platforms “if/until the funding of the underlying network” is resolved.
Embassies and other positions could recover historical data by the end of the month, according to an internal email seen by the New York Times.
