The house of Sino Sharipov (who asked not to use his real name) is located on top of a hill on the northeast side of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, overlooking the city’s coal-powered cement factory and coal-powered thermal power plant. From the vantage point of his home, Sharipov can clearly see the thick layer of smog that covers Dushanbe on most days.
“On really bad days, we can barely see the city from our house because it gets so dusty and gray,” Sharipov told The Diplomat.
Aside from the eye test, Sharipov sometimes relies on the U.S. embassy in Dushanbe’s Air Quality Index (AQI) station data when deciding whether his children should stay indoors and avoid breathing in the city’s dirty air.
The U.S. embassy in Dushanbe is currently one of only two institutional and one of only five overall independent air quality monitoring stations in the capital of Tajikistan. The U.S. embassy’s Air Quality Index account reports daily on the city’s air quality and is followed by over 13,000 people.
They all are about to lose this important and independent information source.
The U.S. State Department recently announced the suspension of its global air quality monitoring program due to “budget constraints” under President Donald Trump’s initiative to shrink the size of the U.S. government. Since 2008, 80 U.S. embassies and consulates around the world have collected and publicly reported on local air quality. The program, which started as a limited but transformational air monitoring effort in China, expanded under Secretary of State John Kerry to the rest of the world. It significantly contributed to research on air quality, led to air quality improvements, and often served as the only reliable source of data on air quality in many locations, including in Central Asia.
In recent years, air quality in Central Asia has deteriorated significantly due to the region’s rapid urbanization, lack of environmental law enforcement, and radical redevelopment of its capitals.
This is particularly true of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, home to the country’s cement production and numerous waste- and coal-burning sites. Despite the fact that over 95 percent of the country’s electricity comes from hydropower, Dushanbe’s electricity and heating are produced by a China-funded coal-powered thermal power plant that significantly contributes to air quality issues when it is operating in the fall and winter. Emissions from vehicles have doubled in the past decade, and now exceed half a million tons of CO2 equivalent per year.
The 2024 report by IQAir, a Swiss company that tracks global air quality, including through the stations it supplies to U.S. embassies around the world, ranked Tajikistan’s air quality as the sixth worst in the world. The concentration of fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, in Tajikistan was nine times higher in 2024 than the World Health Organization (WHO) standard. PM2.5, one of the smallest but most dangerous pollutants that comes from combustion of fossil fuels, dust storms, and wildfires, is linked to the greatest proportion of air pollution-related health complications worldwide. The WHO estimates that air pollution causes at least 7 million premature deaths per year globally.
Despite the Tajik government’s commitment to reduce the country’s emissions of greenhouse gases by 30-40 percent by 2030, compared with 1990 levels, the situation is poised to get much worse. Tajikistan’s National Development Strategy heavily emphasizes industry development. Cement production will rise, and Tajikistan intends to produce 10 million more tons of coal by 2030 than it did in 2016. The government continues welcoming investments in mining, fossil fuels, and construction, all of which contribute to air pollution. Tajikistan’s mandatory pollution inspection of vehicles was deemed ineffective by a U.N. Economic Commission for Europe review, and the electric vehicles in Dushanbe rely on electricity that the city produces by burning coal.
The Tajik government’s air pollution data is seen as unreliable by many locals.
“The authorities have incentives to downplay how bad air pollution has gotten in Dushanbe,” a Dushanbe-based environmental activist who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of repercussions told The Diplomat. The activist called the government’s commitment to reduce air pollution “a ruse for foreign donors” that doesn’t align with “everything else the government does and builds.”
“We need independent parties who could verify government data and keep the officials accountable to the goal [of reducing pollution],” they said.
That accountability now seems a bit less attainable with the suspension of the U.S. air quality monitoring program in Tajikistan and worldwide.
