Air pollution knows no boundaries, impacting the United States regardless of its origin. Take wildfire smoke, for instance, which can travel across borders and contaminate the air we breathe. Similarly, mercury pollution can infiltrate our waters, even if it originates from distant parts of the globe.

Globally, air pollution ranks as a top cause of mortality, claiming over 8 million lives annually, with tens of thousands of these deaths occurring in the U.S. alone. This environmental hazard also imposes a heavy financial burden, costing billions in healthcare expenses, reduced productivity, and educational disruptions.

The U.S. has historically spearheaded efforts to improve air quality worldwide, notably through the Global Air Monitoring Program managed by the U.S. Department of State at its embassies. During our tenure at the State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, we played a pivotal role in launching and executing this initiative. Regrettably, in March 2025, the State Department terminated the program, diminishing air quality monitoring in 44 nations and leaving six without any monitoring capabilities.

We urge the State Department to reinstate this vital program and resume the dissemination of crucial air quality data. Reviving this initiative could save numerous lives and sustain the EPA’s esteemed position in safeguarding public health both domestically and internationally.

Our involvement with the program highlights the effective use of U.S. soft power in combating air pollution. The initiative’s roots trace back to Beijing, just before the 2008 Olympics. With doubts about the transparency of China’s air quality reports, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing installed an air monitor on its premises. This device provided pollution data to embassy personnel and the broader expatriate community, adhering to our health standards.

One of the embassy’s computer programmer colleagues developed a way to publish the air pollution measurements to social media via Twitter. After about a year, local Chinese “netizens” picked up on the data and it went viral among more than 20 million Beijing residents.

At the time, U.S. embassy Beijing was using U.S. air pollution standards (particulate matter of at least 2.5 micrometers or PM2.5) to assign risk to the data, even though the Chinese government was using a much less stringent standard (PM10). As a result, the U.S. Embassy monitor would warn of “hazardous” air when the Chinese monitors reported the air was only “slightly polluted.” 

These discrepancies led the Chinese government to attack the embassy in the press for placing its air monitor “too close to the road,” or “not having a proper lab.” So, the embassy reached out to the EPA to determine whether the Chinese criticisms were warranted. In response, EPA sent a technical team to inspect and shore up the embassy’s monitoring program, making it both scientifically robust and fully aligned with U.S. standards.

Next, the Chinese government called on embassy officials to stop releasing its air quality data to the public. Posing an additional hurdle, Chinese authorities blocked access to Twitter.

Recognizing that the monitor had become a trusted source for accurate, unbiased information that Americans in China were using to make daily health decisions — such as when to run outside or when to enact asthma action plans — the embassy stood firm and kept publishing its data. Since Twitter was blocked locally, Chinese netizens developed work-around apps to pull our data from Twitter and post it locally. And the embassy went further by expanding the program from Beijing to all of its consulates across China.

Things came to a head in fall 2011, when Beijing experienced multiple consecutive days of air pollution so severe that highways were closed and flights cancelled. This drew international media attention to the discrepancy between the embassy monitoring data and official Chinese government readings. Because the embassy readings matched what the public saw with their own eyes, widespread skepticism of China’s air pollution data grew and Chinese citizens pushed for China to move to our EPA’s standard.

Bowing to public pressure in November 2011, the Chinese central government issued new air pollution guidelines, to take effect in 2016, that used standards similar to the stringent U.S. standards used by the embassy. Beijing installed numerous new air monitoring stations using U.S.-built machines and began publishing all of their data. Other major cities quickly followed suit, and by 2013, China had set and implemented the most ambitious air quality improvement program the world had ever seen.

In five years, its major cities and regions experienced unprecedented reductions in air pollution and improvements in public health, saving an estimated 370,000 lives.

Based on the positive results of the program in China, the U.S. secretary of State and EPA administrator were persuaded to launch a global air monitoring partnership in February 2015. In the ten years since, U.S. embassies and consulates have installed air monitors in countries and cities where air pollution was a growing public health threat. Over 80 cities, including New Delhi, Nairobi, Jakarta, São Paulo, and Astana have been able to conveniently provide up-to-the-hour data to U.S. citizens and the local public, enabling them to reduce their exposure to dangerous air pollution.

The U.S. has collaborated with many of these governments to raise awareness of air pollution risks among their citizens and take action to reduce them. A 2022 study found that the average annual economic gain from having a monitor in a given city amounted to $127 million, and that the program was saving each U.S. post an average of almost $34,000 every year just in reductions to hardship pay alone.

The U.S. also benefits, as these cities turn to the U.S. for technologies that can help them understand and reduce severe air pollution, helping to drive exports and the growth of the U.S. domestic environmental technologies sector, representing $432 billion in revenue and employing 1.8 million American workers. The American Lung Association recently estimated that 156 million people in the U.S. live in areas with unhealthy air pollution. U.S. public health is protected by enhanced global monitoring and the reduction of global flows of hazardous air pollution.

Clearly, these significant savings in terms of lives and dollars, and the revenue and jobs created by innovative technologies from the U.S., far outweigh the modest cost of this highly successful and effective U.S. Global Air Monitoring Program. We urge the State Department to restore it. 

Tahra Vose is a former State Department Foreign Service Officer. Dale Evarts is a former air program manager at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.