Egypt has maintained the bottom ninth spot for a secondconsecutive year for air pollution in the World Air Quality Report (pdf) for 2023 from IQAir, a Swiss company that monitors air quality. While Egypt’s stats for the year saw a minor improvement over its performance in 2022, the country still has plenty to go before meeting the World Health Organisation’s quality standards. However, we spoke to one government source who called the firm’s methodology into question and gave us the latest on the government’s efforts to improve Egypt’s air quality.

The methodology: IQAir’s report looks at how many cities around the world met WHO air quality standards in a given year by looking at the average annual concentration of small and hazardous airborne particles known as PM2.5 – one of six pollutants monitored and regulated by environmental agencies due to the “significant impacts to human health and the environment,” according to the report. The WHO recommends that average annual PM2.5 readings should not exceed 5 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m³).

So, how did Egypt fare in 2023? Egypt came in 9th in 2023’s ranking of countries by average PM2.5 concentration to record 42.4, maintaining its position from last year despite seeing slight improvements relative to the year before when the country came in at 46.5, according to the report. The average PM2.5 concentration in Egypt was 8.5 times the WHO annual air quality guidelines. Cairo also maintained its position in tenth place with a PM2.5 reading of 42.4, compared to 47.4 a year earlier, among the world’s most polluted capital cities, and was the fifth most polluted city in Africa — an improvement over last year, when it came in third place.

The last two years were a far cry from Egypt’s data for 2021: Egypt was the 27th most-polluted country in the world in 2021 out of 117 countries surveyed, with an annual reading of PM2.5 standing at 29.1, IQAir said at the time.

Egypt isn’t the only one falling short of WHO standards: Just ten out of the surveyed 134 countries and regions succeeded in achieving the World Health Organization’s air quality standards in 2023 by recording PM2.5 below below the 5 µg/m³ range — down from 13 countries last year, according to the report.

The culprits: Egypt’s air pollution primarily comes from the “particulate matter of both PM2.5 and PM10 varieties,” IQAir said in a separate Egypt-centered report. The pollution mainly comes from “transportation, industry and the open burning of solid organic waste material,” the report said. This is coupled with the country’s close proximity to desert regions causing a large portion of dust to be blown from surrounding lands, along with the lack of rainfall. This collectively causes the quality of air in the nation’s capital to vary between 10-100 times more polluted than the worldwide standards, the report adds.

One government official who spoke to Enterprise was less than convinced with the Swiss firm’s data: “These statistics aren’t from the Environment Ministry, but from individuals with small monitoring devices broadcasting their results unofficially online. The problem with this is that generalizing the results of a single monitoring device in one location in Cairo is entirely inaccurate,” head of the air quality division at the Environment Ministry’s Environmental Affairs Agency Mostafa Mourad told Enterprise. “According to international standards, in a city with approximately 20 mn inhabitants like Cairo, there should be at least 80 monitoring stations to evaluate air quality because air quality varies from one location to another in a city of this size,” Mourad argues. “This doesn’t mean that there’s no pollution in Cairo,” Mourad continued, however, there have been considerable improvements in the Environment Ministry’s monitoring of particulates in the nation’s capital, he said.

There’s also no international standard for measuring air quality: Mourad pointed out that there’s no standardized global criteria for monitoring air quality across different countries (different criteria can be used to get different results), which makes ranking countries in a single study unreliable.

What has been done to address Cairo’s air quality: Cairo and Alexandria’s metro lines are currently undergoing an expansion to lessen the impact of pollution that comes from transportation, while the Public Transport Authority is working on implementing an electric bus system in the capital in a project funded by the World Bank and sponsored by the Environment Ministry, Mourad said. “The plan is to include up to 100 electric buses as part of a plan to have 25% of the authority's fleet powered by electricity in the next five years,” he added. There is also a larger emphasis on using natural gas, as the government looks to phase out buses that operate on diesel and limit its buses to ones that run on electricity or natural gas, he continued.

And there’s more in the pipeline: The Egyptian Pollution Abatement Project, a, EUR 145 mn project launched in the early 1990s by the Environment Ministry to help industries reduce energy and resource consumption and comply with environmental regulations, is expected to wrap up its third phase this year, according to the Environment Ministry’s website. The EU is contributing EUR 10 mn to the third phase, while the European Investment Bank is putting down up to EUR 74 mn. “The project helps improve industrial company’s environmental performance through offering them soft loans,” Mourad previously told Enterprise.

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