An invisible threat: Ground-level ozone

June 03, 2023

On the occasion of the World Environment day, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) issues the alert on the rising ozone pollution and a multi-pollutant crisis in Delhi and the National Capital Region during summer. If unchecked this can become a serious public health crisis in the coming years.

We have continuously alerted about the growing problem of ground-level ozone. The policy and public attention that is nearly fully drawn towards particulate pollution, has neglected mitigation and prevention of the toxic gases. Inadequate monitoring, limited data and inappropriate methods of trend analysis have weakened the understanding of this growing public health hazard. Learn from the advanced economies that after controlling particulate pollution have fallen into the grip of rising NOx and ozone crisis. India should prevent this trap. But the standard practice of Central Pollution Control Board to average out the data of all stations to determine daily AQI cannot capture the public health risk from this short-lived and hyperlocalised pollutant. This underestimates the severity of the local build up and high toxic exposures in the hotspots.