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Nearly half the nation’s children live in places with dangerous levels of air pollution, according to a report released Wednesday by the American Lung Association.

That’s 33.5 million children — 46 percent of the country’s kids — living in areas with failing grades for at least one measure of air pollution that is particularly harmful to developing lungs.

The report also found that people of color are more than twice as likely as white people to live in a community with failing grades for all three measures. Latinos are more than three times as likely to live in such communities, unchanged from last year’s report.

Since 2000, the ALA’s annual State of the Air reports have detailed the nation’s air quality, which improved for decades following the passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act. But in recent years, heat and wildfires worsened by climate change are reversing some of that progress.

Last year’s report, covering 2021 through 2023, showed worsening air pollution during a particularly rough period that included two severe wildfire seasons. Wednesday’s report, looking at air quality from 2022 through 2024, showed that the number of people living in highly polluted areas fell from the prior period but remained well above lows within the last decade. And for the second year in a row, heat-driven ozone pollution got worse.

EPA No Longer Considering Lives Saved in Pollution Rules, Only Cost to Business

The takeaway is that millions of Americans are at risk, said the ALA’s Will Barrett.

“Progress is fragile,” said Barrett, the group’s assistant vice president for nationwide clean air policy. “We have a lot of work left to do to make sure that every child in the United States grows up breathing healthy air.”

Air pollution is a serious health hazard. Years of research have linked it to asthma, heart disease, dementia, cancer, low birth weight and more. It kills about 7 million people every year, the World Health Organization estimates.

Children, whose lungs are smaller and who often breathe more rapidly than adults, taking in more pollution relative to their body size, are especially susceptible to its health effects.

The new ALA report analyzes three years of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air monitoring data, ending in 2024, so it does not yet reflect any impacts from actions taken by President Donald Trump. But his administration has aggressively targeted clean-air protections to benefit polluting industries.

Since January last year, the Trump administration has rolled back air-quality standards, repealed the endangerment finding that allows the EPA to act on climate health threats and granted widespread pollution exemptions to industrial facilities and power plants. It’s also reinvesting in coal.

Each will harm........

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