Cambodia ranks 162nd (out of 178 countries) at the Environmental Performance Index for Air Quality. This air pollution problem, just like other countries is South Asia, is becoming even more important for World Heritage Sites like the Angkor Archeological Park (Siem Reap) - due to the hundreds of tuk-tuks and buses carrying the tourist (check this article). You can read useful advices from the US Embassy on Phnom Penh "Dirty Air", or this interesting blog post about "Air pollution is hardly Cambodia’s highest priority".
Air Quality Data availability
Unfortunately, there is not much information about real-time Air Quality data from the Ministry of the Environment (MOE). And projects like the ASEAN-German Clean Air for Smaller Cities looked promising, but did not provide any tangible monitoring result.
The best solution for providing real-time Air Quality information in Cambodia is for the MOE to start providing official hourly AQI readings. But this can, sometimes, take more time than expected.
Light but visible Air Pollution on Phnom Penh Skyline (attribution).
(Check this articlefor an explanatiom about visual air quality)
Monitoring the Air Quality
GAIA A12 Monitoring Station
Unless data is made available by the authorities, the World Air Quality Index project recommends to start publishing real-time data using some of the affordable air quality monitoring stations, such as the GAIA A12 (picture on the right).
If you are interested in knowing more about this initiative, or about helping to host a station, then please contact us with the form at the bottom of this page.
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