[Translated from Spanish. Original text by Ricardo Pineda Guzmán, María José Martínez.]
In 2024, Honduras experienced one of the worst air quality crises in its recent history. It was not an exclusive episode only for the largest cities: a dense layer of smoke simultaneously covered a large part of the country for weeks. Classes were suspended in Francisco Morazán; the public sector shifted to remote work, and red alerts for poor air quality extended to departments such as Cortés, Yoro, and Comayagua. It was a The situation was experienced by the entire population, yet the decisions to counteract its effects were made practically in the blind.
At that moment, Honduras had only a couple of air quality monitors, but the information they generated was not publicly accessible, and they were concentrated solely in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. The rest of the country, where smoke was also being breathed, had no way of measuring how severe the exposure was, nor how necessary it was to close a school in areas like the north coast, departments like Olancho and Gracias a Dios, or in border communities.
The effects are well-documented. The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago has been categorical: in Honduras, air pollution is the leading external threat to life expectancy. It reduces the lifespan of every Honduran by an average of 2.3 years. The report highlights that air quality kills more people than child and maternal malnutrition combined, and even more than smoking and interpersonal violence.
This same institute mentions how prolonged exposure to PM2.5 is linked to cardiovascular diseases, strokes, lung cancer, childhood asthma, premature births, and cognitive decline, and how the Honduran population is increasingly exposed to suffering from these types of diseases due to the deterioration of air quality.
Today, the air quality monitoring situation is a bit different. In recent years, initiatives like Aire Limpio Honduras, in collaboration with youth organizations, universities, local governments, and both public and private schools, have installed more than 60 air quality monitors across the country’s 18 departments, allowing the Honduran population to access real-time data on what we are breathing. This means that local governments, ministries, teachers, journalists, and families can now make informed decisions on when to suspend classes, avoid going outside, or activate health protocols. These citizen science efforts, accessible through Contracorriente, provide access to real-time data.
The institutional response has also changed. Currently, COPECO issues timely alerts in response to the air quality crisis and publishes daily technical reports that recommend educational centers suspend outdoor activities when levels exceed certain thresholds. Two years ago, this institutional response capacity would have been unfeasible—not due to a lack of will, but because of the absence of data.
What does that data tell us now? In Tegucigalpa, the average PM2.5 over the last 24 hours is more than 50 µg/m³. The cumulative equivalent of the last 30 days: nearly 30 cigarettes smoked, just from breathing. In San Pedro Sula, the concentration a few hours ago reached 82 µg/m³, placing it 16 times above the World Health Organization’s annual guideline.