If you are wondering which are the 15 countries with the cleanest air in the world in 2018, check out our research results.
Regardless of what your plans are, migration to another country or just a trip abroad with your family, the ‘dirty air’ is definitively something you want to avoid. Maybe you are just curious about how your country ranks on the list of the countries with the cleanest air. Nevertheless, after reading this article, you’ll know, where is the cleanest air on Earth.
So, let’s get started – what pollutes the air? Basically, there is a mix of pollutants that make the air hazardous. We can divide them into two categories – the natural pollutants and man-made pollutants. We can’t bring the pollution to zero, but we definitively need to focus on getting that numbers as lower as possible. How can the air quality affect you? Well, it affects all of us apparently. Many respiratory and cardiovascular diseases are the result of polluted air. Asthma, lung cancer, heart strokes, even death. According to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the quality of the air has a big impact on our health.
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Unless you want to put on a gas mask whenever you leave your home, serious changes need to be done. However, we will leave that to the governments, health associations, and organizations that are constantly working on different ideas to reduce the pollution. And, when exactly we can expect the results? Apparently, right now. Scientists are developing various systems that have shown results over the years. Many countries are showing great progress, and some big cities can be considered as top destinations, once again. So, if you are wondering where to go on your next vacation, take a look at the 15 Cities with the Cleanest Air in the World and find out more about places with the cleanest air in the world in 2017. Check out the list of countries with the cleanest air in the world in 2015 to see if there were some changes since then. Also, we are sure that cleanest air in the world 2016 list wouldn’t be much different either.
As we mentioned, people are continuously trying to reduce the pollution, and based on results from the previous years; we can predict the pollution for the incoming year. We started searching for the countries with the cleanest air, but what we found couldn’t suit our needs. Some of the articles on best (and worst) countries for air pollution were our starting point. So, we checked the countries mentioned in these articles for ourselves and also added several more, according to the same criteria.
Our methodology was based on the three parameters: the median concentration of PM2.5 (fine particulate matter), death rate, and the population of a country. The high levels of PM2.5 in the air are the main reason for many diseases, and that’s why we took death rate as our next parameter. We used the air pollution-related death rate per 100,000 population in one year, so we simply had to include the population figures, since we couldn’t compare countries with millions of people and those with only several hundred thousand. How did we get the information? We visited the World Health Organization and used their last report to find the median concentration of PM2.5 and pollution-related death rate. According to WHO, over 3 million people die each year due to air pollution. Their latest report is based on accumulative numbers from the past few years, which is enough for us to predict the future quality of the air. For the countries population, we stuck to Worldometers for the latest results.
Without any more hesitations, let’s proceed to the full list of countries with the cleanest air in the world in 2018.
15. Estonia
How Estonia reached our list of countries with the cleanest air in the world in 2018? Well, its capital city, Tallinn is one of the capitals with the cleanest air in the world. However, Estonia, in general, didn’t rank that well on our list — the median concentration of PM2.5 is 8, the crude death rate is 24 per 100,000 people, and the total population is 1,309,632.
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