Forty-six percent of American children live in areas where air pollution reaches dangerous levels, according to the American Lung Association's latest annual assessment released Wednesday. That translates to 33.5 million young people exposed to unhealthy smog, soot, or both.
The 27th annual report evaluated data from 2022 to 2024, measuring ground-level ozone and particulate pollution across the country. The findings paint a stark picture: 7 million children, or 10 percent of the nation's youth, reside in communities that failed every single pollution measure.
Children face particular vulnerability because their lungs are still developing and they breathe more air relative to body size, according to Will Barrett, assistant vice-president of the American Lung Association's Nationwide Clean Air Policy. "Kids play outdoors, they're more active, they're breathing in more outdoor air," he explained. "Air pollution exposure in children can contribute to long-term developmental harm to their lungs, new cases of asthma, increased risks of respiratory illness and other health considerations later in life."
The burden falls most heavily on communities of color. Though people of color make up 42.1 percent of the U.S. population, they represent 54.2 percent of those living in counties with at least one failing pollution grade. A person of color is 2.42 times more likely than a white person to live in a community failing all three measures. These disparities compound because residents in such areas are already more likely to have chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, and heart disease that amplify pollution's harmful effects.
Smog has become the most widespread pollutant across America. Between 2022 and 2024, 38 percent of the population, roughly 129.1 million people, experienced ozone levels that threaten health. This marks the highest total in six years and a jump of 3.9 million people from the year before.
Extreme heat, drought, and wildfires have accelerated the problem. The southwestern corridor from California to Texas and much of the Midwest face the heaviest ozone exposure, with 2023 wildfires in Canada sending smoke into U.S. airspace while southern states experienced temperature and weather patterns that favored ozone formation in both 2023 and 2024.
Climate change itself is worsening the trend by intensifying the atmospheric conditions that allow ozone to build up. Warmer temperatures and lower wind speeds trap pollutants in the air longer, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of degradation.
The report also identified a growing threat: datacenters. These facilities now consume roughly 4.4 percent of total U.S. electricity, a figure projected to reach 12 percent within a decade. Most rely on regional electrical grids still powered heavily by fossil fuels like coal and methane gas, while many operate diesel-powered backup generators that emit carcinogenic particles.
Barrett warned that solving the datacenter problem requires a shift to clean renewable energy. "As the demand for increases in datacenters continues to grow, the focus needs to be on non-combustion, clean renewable energy sources that are additive and not taking away from the grid," he said.
The Trump administration's recent environmental rollbacks threaten to worsen these conditions. The EPA has delayed enforcement of particle pollution standards, repealed vehicle emissions standards, reversed rules limiting oil and gas facility emissions, and relaxed restrictions on coal plants' release of mercury and other toxic air contaminants.
The agency has also disbanded its air quality advisory committees and eliminated the practice of calculating the public health value of lives saved through pollution reduction while still counting costs to industry.
Since taking office last year, the Trump administration has initiated at least 70 actions rolling back environmental and climate protections. Barrett characterized this as a systematic effort to dismantle health safeguards. "There's a devaluing of children's health by this EPA as they are weakening, delaying and repealing critical health protection," he said. "There is a wide-scale effort by the federal EPA to eliminate health protections while also distancing themselves from their own mission to protect public health."
Author James Rodriguez: "These numbers reveal a straightforward collision between public health and regulatory gutting that will take years to undo."
Comments