ChronosAIR — what the air costs

ChronosAIR PM2.5 · South Africa

Cost of breathing this

−0.0

years off your life expectancy

If this is the air you breathe every day, for a lifetime. Not one bad afternoon. Not one winter week.

Drag to set the air 5.0 µg/m³

Sustained annual mean PM2.5 concentration, micrograms per cubic metre

Meets the WHO guideline

This air is legal here. South Africa allows an annual average of 20 µg/m³ — four times what the World Health Organization considers safe.

Where this number comes from

Each 10 µg/m³ of sustained PM2.5 above the WHO guideline of 5 µg/m³ costs about 0.98 years of life expectancy. The relationship comes from the Air Quality Life Index, developed at the University of Chicago. It describes long-run average exposure across a population. It is not a personal forecast, and it says nothing about any single day.

The scale is marked with the WHO guideline and its four interim targets. The mark at 20 is South Africa's legal annual standard, shown as a compliance flag rather than a health band, because those are not the same thing.

No South African places are marked yet. The national monitoring network has published no public PM2.5 readings since March 2024. Annual averages have to be measured before they can be shown, so local benchmarks appear here only once there is evidence behind them.