Today, 5 June, marks World Environment Day. This day was established in 1972 by the United Nations to raise people’s awareness on our vulnerable environment and the actual environmental issues.
This year’s World Environment Day is hosted by China, with a theme on air pollution, a world-wide issue that is most prominent in the Asia-Pacific region. In this region, air pollution directly or indirectly causes an estimated 4 million deaths (from the 7 million people world-wide). In some major Chinese cities, the air can sometimes be so polluted that even on a ‘clear’ sunny day people hardly see the sun.
Nevertheless, the Chinese government is taking measures to improve the air quality, which is already observed over the last few years from space by dedicated air quality satellite sensors.
Below we show a PROBA-V image of 17 May 2019 of Zhanjiang, a city in the south of China with ~6.5 million inhabitants, located at the South Chinese Sea. The city can be seen as a grey area in the top-middle part of the image. At the bottom of the image the northern part of the Hainan island is visible.