according to the american lung association, 156 million americans, a staggering 46% of the us population, are living in areas of unhealthy air quality.

every year the american lung association conducts a “state of the air” report which evaluates two of the more widespread air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone. the 2025 “state of the air” report downgraded the washington-baltimore-arlington area from a “c” to an “f” for daily particle pollution (soot). the region dropped from a previous “c” grade due to increased levels of dangerous air pollution, placing it as the 36th-worst region in the nation for ozone, or “smog.”

kevin stewart is the director of environmental health for the american lung association and leads the group’s efforts informing the public about air pollution.

“we actually did in the district, in the 2017 report, have an ‘a’ grade with zero bad air days for fine particle pollution,” stewart said. “but that was the last time we had an ‘a,’ and everything since then has been ‘b,’ ‘c’s, and then eventually then this past report, we had an ‘f’ grade because we had a total of nine bad air days. four of them were in the red category, which means it’s unhealthy for everyone, and that’s a significant number that we want people to understand they were exposed to.”

some groups are more at risk to be affected by poor air quality than others. susan anenberg is a professor at the george washington university milken institute school of public health. anenberg’s research focuses on the health implications of air pollution.

“people who work outdoors or who spend a lot of time outdoors are particularly at risk from outdoor air pollution,” anenberg said. “people who are very young or very old, who are pregnant, or who have other conditions, other maladies, other illnesses, those folks are, unfortunately, are more at risk from air pollution.”

one of the more at-risk groups are those with asthma. anenberg used data from nasa satellites to examine air pollution in cities including d.c. she has found that the zip codes with the highest levels of fine particle pollution in the air are also the neighborhoods with the highest levels of asthma, lung disease, and stroke. she found that the rate of emergency room visits for asthma in wards 7 and 8 was 23 times higher than the rate in ward 3.

additionally, people of color are more than twice as likely as white people to live in communities with failing grades across all of the pollution metrics. for hispanic populations, according to the report, that risk is nearly tripled.

“unfortunately, air pollution is not equitably distributed across the country, and certainly not within urban areas,” anenberg said. “we find quite a lot of inequity and people who live in places that overall have lower income levels and lower educational attainment levels, and higher proportions of the population who are non-white, unfortunately experience a lot more air pollution exposure than the average. and part of the reason for that is that we’ve had, over time, systemic forces that play in the construction of our polluting sources.”

michelle mabson works at a nonprofit called earth justice and said factors like climate change are driving worse air quality.

“one of the contributors to that report and the failing grade for short-term pollution, especially, was the canadian wildfires in 2023, which is still relevant today, because with climate change, we’re seeing increases in wildfires,” mabson said. “just the summer alone, we had a similar poor air quality because of canadian wildfires. so we’re seeing that phenomenon increase in frequency.”

jalil ahari, ph.d., an assistant professor of medicine at the george washington university, specializes in pulmonary medicine and said air quality affects about 30% of his work.

“imagine this. your lungs, on each lung, you have about 150 million balloons. so there are about 300 million balloons we have on our lungs,” ahari said. “these are small balloons, right? now, these balloons, if you cut them and put them on the floor, they become the size of a tennis court. so right now, when i’m walking on the streets, i’m breathing through my nose, then my nostrils, the two nostrils, take the air and disperse it on a tennis court. and a lot of those things that i inhale will actually be trapped in our lungs and never go away.”

stewart said that a relatively large portion of the population belongs to one or more of the at-risk groups.

“when i talk about those high-risk groups that i enumerated, roughly half the population fits into at least one of them. some people fit into multiple of those groups,” stewart said. “that means that almost every family has somebody that they know in their family who is going to be at higher risk for air pollution. so that certainly means we want people to stay aware of what the air quality is.”