Hong Kong Pollution Email Alert
歡迎瀏覽「健康空氣行動 - 空氣污染電郵警示服務」(測試版)。請輸入閣下的電郵地址，並選擇擬接收警示服務地區之空氣質素監測站。當該空氣質素監測站所量度到的空氣污染指數超過100，我們將透過閣下輸入的電郵地址發出警示。政府共設有14個空氣質素監測站，其中3個為路邊監測站。
Welcome to Clean Air Network’s Pollution Alert Service (BETA). Please enter your email, then choose the air quality monitoring stations from which you would like to receive alerts when the Hong Kong Government API exceeds 100. The Government monitors air quality with a network of 14 stations, of which only 3 are roadside monitors.
路邊空氣污染是對人體健康的最大威脅
Roadside emissions harm human health the most.
雖然香港現行的空氣質素標準已設立超過20年，但是我們仍然決定跟隨政府的警報制度，採用以香港空氣污染指數是否超過100作為發出警報的指標。請注意，由於香港空氣質素標準過時，而且比世衛空氣質素指引寬鬆2至4倍，所以，當香港空氣污染指數低於100時，我們不能武斷當日的空氣質素屬於健康水平。
Although the standards on which the API are based are more than 20 years old, we have, for the time being, decided to align our alert system with the Government’s warnings. Because of how outdated the API is, air quality readings below 100 do NOT indicate that the air is healthy to breathe. Rather, Hong Kong’s maximum pollutant guidelines presently permit 2-4 times the pollutant levels recommended by the WHO.
相反，當香港空氣污染指數高於100時，我們卻可以確定，當日的空氣質素危害人體健康。
What we do know is that air quality above 100 is definitely HAZARDOUS to human health.
請注意：此電郵警示服務仍在測試階段，未來有可能作出輕微改進以提升服務及表現水平。
Please Note: This email alert service is in beta and may be subject to minor changes to improve service and performance.
Hello Joanne,
I don’t have a facebook a/c. Pls tell how much we are affected by polution from north of the border. During the Chinese New Yr holidays. The air was much clearer. I thought it was then cleaner. I thought it was because majority of factory north of us are closed. Do you think that our feeble government can get the Guangdong authorities to help ?
Best regards
T C Lee
Hi there,
Thanks for your comment!
Our government and their counterparts in Guangdong seem to have taken the first step. They signed a joint cooperation pact recently, wherein one of the key initiatives is tackling regional air pollution. Whether they will follow through on this remains to be seen. We have to continue to let the HK govt know that better air quality is a priority.
The press release on the pact can be found here.
Guangzhou is also making plans to reduce air pollution significantly in prepration for the 2010 Asian Games, which are happening in November. We posted about that on our website here.
Hope that’s helpful!
If you don’t have facebook, you can also follow us on twitter, should you want to receive more information on air pollution related news.
Do I need to pay for the subscription?
Hi, my name is Dr. Rosales, I wanted to thank you for the accurate information. I was searching google for this and finally found it, please accept my appreciation for your work. Thanks!
Thank you for your support!
[...] If you live in Hong Kong and you want to sign up for an email alert to fill you in on the day's pollution levels, you can do it here at the Clean Air Network. [...]
[...] There goes the ‘it couldn’t be as bad as it looks’ mantra that we tell ourselves as we walk out the door every morning. It’s the first study correlating visibility and mortality to be conducted in Hong Kong, though similar studies have been done in other cities. (More on that in a moment.) That’s surprising because the worsening air quality is consistently a huge concern among residents of this otherwise fine city. According to two recent studies, 1 in 4 residents are considering leaving the city due to the bad air quality, and 91% of parents are worried how the it affects their kids’ health. In 1968, residents had to suffer about eight days of pollution-caused murk in a year. By last year, it was 46 days, or about one every week. Most of the avoidable deaths in the study, according to Dr. Thach Thuan-quoc and one of study’s team members, were due to respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Though global studies have long linked those two diseases with air pollution, and specifically the high presence of particulates and nitrogen dioxide, using visibility as an indicator is a less examined approach. But this and other studies have found, as one would suspect, that visibility directly reflects the concentration of harmful pollutants in the air, and is therefore a useful tool to residents who are already at risk. “Looking out the window can now function as a reliable way to gauge the danger to one’s health,” Joanne Ooi, CEO of Hong Kong’s Clean Air Network, said in a statement released today. (See a list of the world’s most polluted places.) The implications of the study are important, particularly in many parts of Asia. Being able to use visibility has a tool for measuring effects on health is particularly useful in the developing world where, despite the growing need for it, there still isn’t a lot of sophisticated equipment out there monitoring air quality. While residents in high-pollution areas can, as Ooi says, reliably use their own eyes to determine whether or not to overexpose themselves on a given day, scientists or health groups can use visibility data collected from airports and meteorological stations in most parts of the world to study pollutants’ health effects. A 2009 study about the correlation between visibility and mortality over a year (2004-2005) in Shanghai – surprisingly, the first to be conducted in mainland China — found similar correlations between visibility and a rise in daily death rates in nine Shanghai neighborhoods. The study, authored by Haidong Kan of Fudan University in Shanghai, found that a decrease of 4.9 miles (8k) in visibility was associated with a 2.17% increase in total mortality, with a 3.36% increase in cardiovascular deaths and a 3.06% increase in respiratory related deaths. The group that was most affected was, not surprisingly, in the 65 and older age group. In a 2010 study published in the Indian Journal of Public Health, the association with mortality and air quality, as measured by visibility, in the Punjab city of Ludhiana was even more significant: “For every 1 km (.6 mile) decrease in visibility at midday, mortality due to natural causes increased by 2.4%,” the study found. It’s important to note, of course, that people live differently in different places. The level of exposure that somebody in the extremely densely populated spaces of Hong Kong or Shanghai might have every day to pollution might be greater than somebody might in a North American city. (If you have ever spent a day walking around either, you’ll see what I mean. There is a reason you see people covering their mouths on every corner in Hong Kong as the buses go belching by.) Both the study’s authors and environmental advocates take the government to task for their less-than-proactive approach to improving Hong Kong’s air quality. Professor Anthony Hedley, the principal researcher of the Hong Kong study, writes that the avoidable deaths uncovered in their data is just “the tip of a massive iceberg of harm to health that this ‘epidemic’ can extend more than 50 years. Air quality is unlikely to improve in the near future because the government refuses to adopt international guidelines for air quality management and health protection.” In a recent review of its Air Quality Objectives, the Environmental Protection Department identified that public health should be a cornerstone of the government’s impending new air quality plan. After the study was released today, the Clean Air Network immediately called for that long-promised plan to be adopted, and for the establishment of a special unit in the government to come up with a cohesive, health-based air quality policy. Looking out the window of the Time office right now, I can’t say that sounds like a bad idea. I don’t have elderly relatives in this city who suffer from heart or lung disease, but millions do. And hopefully they’re inside. If you live in Hong Kong and you want to sign up for an email alert to fill you in on the day’s pollution levels, you can do it here at the Clean Air Network. [...]
[...] There goes the ‘it couldn’t be as bad as it looks’ mantra that we tell ourselves as we walk out the door every morning. It’s the first study correlating visibility and mortality to be conducted in Hong Kong, though similar studies have been done in other cities. (More on that in a moment.) That’s surprising because the worsening air quality is consistently a huge concern among residents of this otherwise fine city. According to two recent studies, 1 in 4 residents are considering leaving the city due to the bad air quality, and 91% of parents are worried how the it affects their kids’ health. In 1968, residents had to suffer about eight days of pollution-caused murk in a year. By last year, it was 46 days, or about one every week. Most of the avoidable deaths in the study, according to Dr. Thach Thuan-quoc and one of study’s team members, were due to respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Though global studies have long linked those two diseases with air pollution, and specifically the high presence of particulates and nitrogen dioxide, using visibility as an indicator is a less examined approach. But this and other studies have found, as one would suspect, that visibility directly reflects the concentration of harmful pollutants in the air, and is therefore a useful tool to residents who are already at risk. “Looking out the window can now function as a reliable way to gauge the danger to one’s health,” Joanne Ooi, CEO of Hong Kong’s Clean Air Network, said in a statement released today. (See a list of the world’s most polluted places.) The implications of the study are important, particularly in many parts of Asia. Being able to use visibility has a tool for measuring effects on health is particularly useful in the developing world where, despite the growing need for it, there still isn’t a lot of sophisticated equipment out there monitoring air quality. While residents in high-pollution areas can, as Ooi says, reliably use their own eyes to determine whether or not to overexpose themselves on a given day, scientists or health groups can use visibility data collected from airports and meteorological stations in most parts of the world to study pollutants’ health effects. A 2009 study about the correlation between visibility and mortality over a year (2004-2005) in Shanghai – surprisingly, the first to be conducted in mainland China — found similar correlations between visibility and a rise in daily death rates in nine Shanghai neighborhoods. The study, authored by Haidong Kan of Fudan University in Shanghai, found that a decrease of 4.9 miles (8k) in visibility was associated with a 2.17% increase in total mortality, with a 3.36% increase in cardiovascular deaths and a 3.06% increase in respiratory related deaths. The group that was most affected was, not surprisingly, in the 65 and older age group. In a 2010 study published in the Indian Journal of Public Health, the association with mortality and air quality, as measured by visibility, in the Punjab city of Ludhiana was even more significant: “For every 1 km (.6 mile) decrease in visibility at midday, mortality due to natural causes increased by 2.4%,” the study found. It’s important to note, of course, that people live differently in different places. The level of exposure that somebody in the extremely densely populated spaces of Hong Kong or Shanghai might have every day to pollution might be greater than somebody might in a North American city. (If you have ever spent a day walking around either, you’ll see what I mean. There is a reason you see people covering their mouths on every corner in Hong Kong as the buses go belching by.) Both the study’s authors and environmental advocates take the government to task for their less-than-proactive approach to improving Hong Kong’s air quality. Professor Anthony Hedley, the principal researcher of the Hong Kong study, writes that the avoidable deaths uncovered in their data is just “the tip of a massive iceberg of harm to health that this ‘epidemic’ can extend more than 50 years. Air quality is unlikely to improve in the near future because the government refuses to adopt international guidelines for air quality management and health protection.” In a recent review of its Air Quality Objectives, the Environmental Protection Department identified that public health should be a cornerstone of the government’s impending new air quality plan. After the study was released today, the Clean Air Network immediately called for that long-promised plan to be adopted, and for the establishment of a special unit in the government to come up with a cohesive, health-based air quality policy. Looking out the window of the Time office right now, I can’t say that sounds like a bad idea. I don’t have elderly relatives in this city who suffer from heart or lung disease, but millions do. And hopefully they’re inside. If you live in Hong Kong and you want to sign up for an email alert to fill you in on the day’s pollution levels, you can do it here at the Clean Air Network. [...]
Please help us!!!
We are dying in a very modern, beautiful city,
The air are so bad I walk around with my hand covering my mouth and nose.
We are living in a city where everyone smoke, without really having a cigarette in our hand.
The old and young have to stay indoor on most bad days.
A city with so many high tech building but we are living in a big ashtray.
The government treat us like little children. telling us “we are making big affect to reduce air population”, so far nothing is done but there are more bad days than good day.
HELP!!!!!
Thanks for making this website.