I live in Ostrava, some 160 km away. Entire Upper Silesia is a bad place for air quality in winter, it can often be seen on continental maps as a sore red spot.
Fortunately most of the coal burning is gone, but individual people still burn all sorts of shit in their homes. PET bottles etc.
I used to live in Gdansk, and later Gdynia, and let me tell you - as soon as it's cold outside, people burn all kinds of shit at home, the air's so thick you can practically cut it with a knife. We theorized that the smog's mainly from residential burning of coal, but of course who know's what's in the stove.
All I know, is that it smells really unhealthy, and the smoke coming out of houses is a deep, black colour, almost like oil.
Unfortunately this is our national mentality - no one can tell me what I should do, and if I get told to stop, I will double down just to piss off that someone who insulted my pride.
The biggest enemy of a Pole is always their neighbor. One may suffocate in their own fumes, but what's important is that this loser next door dies as well.
I live in Germany and when I see a Diesel car with black smoke coming out of the exhaust pipe it turns always out to be a Pole who removed the soot filter to save some Cents of Diesel.
There's an interesting coping mechanism (verging on the conspiracy theory) popular on some Polish forums, namely that the abysmal data comes from abundance of sensors combined with them being placed (by whom and why? here's where the conspiracy part kicks in) in the most polluted spots.
It depends what you're burning and how you burn it.
If you're burning gas, you're burning it either at the perfect fuel/air ratio or maybe just a little lean. You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out.
If you're piling up coal in a stove you're getting all sorts of crap out of the chimney, including radioactive dust.
It's one of the reasons that cars have been fitted with catastrophic converters. These remove the CO and HC by reacting it with what little excess oxygen there is in the exhaust stream to turn it into carbon dioxide and water, and at the same time produce massive amounts of nitrogen oxides. It reduces the efficiency by quite a bit but that's okay because it's a tiny effect compared to turning a huge chunk of Africa into a toxic hellscape to mine the palladium and rhodium the catalyst uses.
We'd have incredibly clean cities if we ran vehicles on propane instead of petrol, and in the UK there was a big push to do this about 25-30 years ago. Obviously this got a lot of pushback from the banks and car manufacturers, because it wasn't selling people enough debt. Don't adapt your existing car to run on clean fuel that's mostly burnt as production waste! Sell your dirty polluting petrol car that only gets 38MPG and buy this nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel that gets an incredible 39MPG! And all at only 14.7% APR!
To be exact: the problem here is fossil fuel and wood being burned in inefficient furnaces/stoves/fireplaces where the fuel doesn't fully burn. There are efforts by the government to replace them but they aren't super effective yet (random example: https://um.warszawa.pl/kopciuchy).
For the industrial scale fossil fuel furnaces this problem is solved already (they are obviously still bad because of their huge CO2 emissions but that's a different problem).
Natural gas heating is not the problem in this case, it burns very cleanly with semi-modern heaters. The pollution is from coal, wood, and especially all kinds of trash (plastic, painted cardboard, pieces of various engineering wood products).
Warsaw is top 15, Krakow and Warsaw are the only European cities in the top 15. For some added context, it's around -10 degrees celcius there right now. I don't know why Poland stands out here, but I know that older residential areas burn wood (in other Eastern European countries as well), because that's just how you heat an old house: these neigbourhoods are horrible to walk through in winter, because the air just stinks of smoke.
6 stations. One from "corporate contributor" named Arek (common Polish first name, short from Arkadiusz so does not look like a big corp) plus 5 other individual contributors.
What equipment those 6 stations have? No idea. Are the instruments calibrated properly? No idea. Are they placed in the right spot, not on the balcony near the chimney? No idea. Are they placed evenly across Krakow to give reliable city-wide data? Looking on the provided locations - not really.
Iqair seems to "crowdsource" their measurements so they get "crowdsourced" data, which can be total crap. Do they even verify those data? How? No idea.
The page only lists 126 cities, with the bottom three having an AQI of 0.
So the editorialized title is incorrect. It's not "top 5 worst air quality worldwide", it's only top 5 in this list, which is a small subset of the world's cities.
It's a Swiss company but even Switzerland's largest city, Zürich, is missing.
China sure as hell has more than 8 cities and Russia more than 2.
Few years ago Kraków has forbidden the use of solid fuels which improved the situation significantly. Days like today are happening much less often since then. Moreover, Kraków has probably one of the densest network of pollution sensors in the world, which is why we talk about it at all. There are places in Poland that are much worse off, but there's not that much data to back it up.
My understanding is that the problem is exacerbated by the shape of surrounding terrain and atmospheric conditions. I.e. the city is in a cavity and on cold days there is a mass of high pressure that pushes all the smog down.
But you are correct I believe (hailing from Wro here) - there have been many countermeasures implemented and cities are packed with sensors. Only so much can be done.
I might be wrong, but I thought the situation in Kraków improved significantly several years ago due to the efforts of local administration, so much that we were jealous here in Warsaw. Has it worsened again since then?
That's just yet another coping mechanism, I believe.
I lived in Krakow in ~2015, and live there now. It's the same. It smells the same, it looks the same, the polution levels are the same, and the number of days like today in a year is the same.
I love Poland, love the people. In many towns though (ie I was in Bielsko-Biała recently) it smells like many things run on coal (like residential heating).
I've been living there for 15years and it's the reason I've moved away. Frankly I love the city enough that I would sabotage my health for it. Not my kids health though. Asthma related problems in kids are widespreada and of course bad air quality is related to tons of other negative consequences.
I wonder though how do they compute the number (is it average across points measured in the city?). Because within city borders air quality varies wildly. There are some regions where it is actually pretty good.
We got a whiff of that in Berlin a few weeks ago when we got some cold wind from the east. Really noticeably bad air quality when I went outside to enjoy the snow and the cold. When I checked the map, I saw that we are basically getting Poland's pollution blowing our way. Most of the time the winds blow from the west and it's fine. Berlin has a bit of traffic but not a lot of coal plants or industry. It would be better if it got rid of a lot of the heavy diesel traffic in the city. That's slowly happening. But it's not that bad here most of the time.
The point of pollution is that it stinks (literally) and is bad for your health. Pollution kills people, shortens expected life times by years, causes respiratory issues for children, etc. Those are some good reasons to do something about it. There are good alternatives to coal at this point. Mostly this is just inefficient legacy infrastructure that we pay extra for to keep going to "protect jobs". From a macro economic point of view, that stopped making sense quite some time ago. Which is why coal plants are going extinct in a lot of places.
Even gas plants are a big improvement. I think of them as a stop gap solution that might be economically risky long term. Wind, solar, and batteries are cheaper. Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean). However, gas plants are undeniably a pragmatic compromise between cost and polluting. Unlike nuclear they are easy to switch off when not needed and can act as a fallback solution when wind/solar fall short in the winter. LNG is not cheap though and that makes gas plants long term risky as renewables plus batteries marginalizes their use to the point where they are deeply unprofitable.
There's a base load argument that often pops up in these discussions. Gas plants are nice because they can be switched off. Base load is basically the type of power that is expensive to switch off. Mainly coal and nuclear. This is actually problematic in a grid with a lot of intermittent power supply (wind/solar). Dispatchability is more important. Gas power is good because it is rapidly dispatchable. Batteries act as a buffer and minimize the need for gas plants to run.
Baseload doesn't characterize power plants but demand. For PP the relevant terms are firm power/firming and modulation. Firm power is anything from hydro to thermal plants. But modulation capacity and costs are different. Hydro is extremely good in both regards. Nuclear and gas are about on par in terms of modulation speed (depends on models on both sides) but gas is cheaper to use as peaker. On the other hand gas, esp LNG is expensive and will become even more so with CO2 tax increase. Coal is slower to modulate, but very cheap to operate without co2 tax and very expensive with tax enforced. That's why coal is going away- co2 tax is making even lng cheaper than some coal units to run
Ren per unit are cheap but transition will still cost a lot, incl all relevant infra around them. Some countries can afford going faster, like Germany, others will go slower. It's hard to say now how things will pan out due to increasing geopolitical instability which can cause funds reallocation for say military or other sectors
That's completely made-up. And also - nobody "smells" pollution from Poland in Berlin. Even AI would not generate this erroneous claim.
> Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean).
And that's also made up. What is "clean" here? Radioactivity? Also if you refer to carbon cost, you have to calculate in EVERYTHING including mining and transport. So no, it is not clean - that is a lobbyist dream to claim otherwise.
The list appears to contain some inconsistencies. For example, Jaipur, India has an AQI of approximately 175, yet it does not appear in the top rankings, despite being larger in both population and geographic size.
I see your wintertime air pollution in Krakow and raise you Ulaanbaatar. It gets so bad that there’s a marked increase in miscarriages in the winter months.
Where I live, in nearby villages of 300-500 people living in sparse uninsulated family homes you can almost faint from air pollution (temps at +-0C). Wood (>10tn per 100sqm) or coal can severely impact the local environment. So a dozen dirty chimneys are enough let alone thousands of people allowed to burn anything flammable. No industry can rival this.
Despite Międzyzdroje (zachodniopomorskie, Poland) lying directly at the seaside, the air quality in winter is so bad it literally irritates the throat and can even give you headaches or make you nauseous, and only directly on the beach can you still breathe fresh air.
The common argument is that people use bad furnaces or burn bad fuel or trash out of poverty, but far too often the actual cause is mentality and not financial issues.
Smog kills around 40,000 Polish people each year. [1] It was reported in 2025 to be 20 times more than in car accidents. [2]
On the bright side, industrial and post-apo art fans can wear breathing masks in Poland without even pretending.
IQAir has shit coverage. I live in Kazakhstan in a city at the eastern part of the country, near the border with Chinese Xinjiang, where PM2.5 levels regularly exceed 1000 µg/m³ (that's right, it's not a typo). The highest concentration I've seen this winter is 1900 µg/m³ just a couple of days ago.
SO₂ pollution is also extreme, with levels of 1000 µg/m³ being exceeded on a regular basis, and 5000-8000 µg/m³ not unheard of. Yes, I am sure of these numbers, it's not a typo.
Right at this moment there's some wind and the pollution has somewhat subsided, but it won't last: it's an exception. For example, the average PM2.5 concentration over the last month is around 250 µg/m³, depending on the exact place.
We have extensive network of air sensors, but it's not currently public (it only started working a couple of months ago and is in the process of being made available to the public). I can only recommend looking at https://aqicn.org, which has much better coverage than IQAir, and speaking of our country specifically, it collects data from our old sensors provided by the government.
Disregard anything that looks suspicious (some of the sensors are not working and show zero levels of pollution -- they're simply broken).
My city is the worst one, but actually most Central Asian cities have terrible air quality due to harsh winters and outdated heating methods with zero emission control. Much, much worse than anything in Poland or Europe generally. You won't see them on IQAir because AFAIK they mostly collect data through their own sensors, which are expensive and not used here.
Lyon, France is occassionally right up there too. If the weather (mostly the wind) is right/wrong we can shoot right up the ranking thanks to the geography of the surrounding region.
I live in Bangkok and we also get inversions during the "cold" (for Thailand haha) season, the same time that farms slash and burn, making this the worst time of year for our air quality as well.
It's much better this year but incredibly hard to police since officials often don't have jurisdiction where the pm2.5 originated, before getting trapped in the inversion
iqair has pretty sparse coverage, especially in developing areas. A lot of places with really shitty air do not hit the top simply cause the service is effectively blind in those places.
However, I regularly see a lot of Balkan cities hitting the top 10. Sarajevo was #1 quite a few times. Not sure whether it's really worse than Delhi or Beijing, but sometimes it's really really bad. Like, if you imagine the most smoky bar you ever visited, where you see nothing but the cigarette smoke and can't breath. That's how you feel on the street.
There are many houses in Poland that are using coal heating, and unfortunately a lot of people burn there their thrash. Kraków is surrounded by smaller towns and villages, where single family houses are common. To make things even worse, Kraków is in a basin, which makes the air flow even more difficult. If you add there years of city mismanagement when it comes to air flow, you land in such a situation
"Krakow’s pollution stems from a mix of local and regional sources. A primary culprit is domestic heating, the burning of coal and wood in older, inefficient household boilers and stoves remains widespread in the Małopolska region (1).
Car traffic also adds nitrogen oxides and fine particulates, exacerbated by an ageing vehicle fleet. Topography and meteorology worsen the problem, Krakow sits in a basin-like region prone to temperature inversions and limited ventilation, allowing pollutants to accumulate.
Additionally, emissions drift in from surrounding municipalities and industrial zones, making regional coordination crucial to air quality. Despite a solid-fuel ban in the city since 2019 and the replacement of many coal boilers, compliance is uneven and some residents still use banned fuel."
I think it’s topology (concave) + widespread poor heating methods in the agglomeration + a very bad day + inefficient combustion engines.
I’d maybe include accurate measurements. The government isn’t trying to hide that and doesn’t have the means to, and highly quality sensors are widespread.
Despite government incentives and regulations some people burn garbage in stows. It's a local cultural thing and the state seemingly is powerless to do anything about it despite being the 20th economy in the world.
I'd suspect just small amount of datapoints with maybe bias for people installing air sensors because that particular area's air quality is bad for whatever reason (near to road, neighbour have old coal boiler etc.)
There isn't much wind there at all so the pollution can't escape. I'm not saying this isn't the residents' fault, but it isn't entirely the residents' fault.
Assuming a large contributing factor is all the coal plants now running to sustain Germany's independence from nuclear? Berlin's air quality has also tanked a lot since the energy crisis started.
I am sceptic of that listing. Normally, the bigger a city, the
more waste it would accumulate. So why are almost all cities in
China and India, ranked below? Save for two in India. Something
is strange with that listing. Also if you do an image search on
Google, Krakow is nowhere ugly or dirty. Yes, these images have
a bias too, but compare it to the megacities in India. There is
just no comparison here.
sojuz151|1 month ago
inglor_cz|1 month ago
I live in Ostrava, some 160 km away. Entire Upper Silesia is a bad place for air quality in winter, it can often be seen on continental maps as a sore red spot.
Fortunately most of the coal burning is gone, but individual people still burn all sorts of shit in their homes. PET bottles etc.
my_throwaway23|1 month ago
All I know, is that it smells really unhealthy, and the smoke coming out of houses is a deep, black colour, almost like oil.
stratocumulus0|1 month ago
The biggest enemy of a Pole is always their neighbor. One may suffocate in their own fumes, but what's important is that this loser next door dies as well.
Aldipower|1 month ago
marqueewinq|1 month ago
Jokes aside, this sounds terrible. What are the policies in place to prevent this?
jve|1 month ago
praptak|1 month ago
Here's a debunk by a popular Polish fact checking portal (in Polish): https://demagog.org.pl/analizy_i_raporty/smog-nie-taki-zly-j...
unglaublich|1 month ago
But it's a silent killer, so let's dramatize fantasy nuclear accidents instead.
ErroneousBosh|1 month ago
If you're burning gas, you're burning it either at the perfect fuel/air ratio or maybe just a little lean. You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out.
If you're piling up coal in a stove you're getting all sorts of crap out of the chimney, including radioactive dust.
It's one of the reasons that cars have been fitted with catastrophic converters. These remove the CO and HC by reacting it with what little excess oxygen there is in the exhaust stream to turn it into carbon dioxide and water, and at the same time produce massive amounts of nitrogen oxides. It reduces the efficiency by quite a bit but that's okay because it's a tiny effect compared to turning a huge chunk of Africa into a toxic hellscape to mine the palladium and rhodium the catalyst uses.
We'd have incredibly clean cities if we ran vehicles on propane instead of petrol, and in the UK there was a big push to do this about 25-30 years ago. Obviously this got a lot of pushback from the banks and car manufacturers, because it wasn't selling people enough debt. Don't adapt your existing car to run on clean fuel that's mostly burnt as production waste! Sell your dirty polluting petrol car that only gets 38MPG and buy this nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel that gets an incredible 39MPG! And all at only 14.7% APR!
Profit before the environment, as always.
praptak|1 month ago
For the industrial scale fossil fuel furnaces this problem is solved already (they are obviously still bad because of their huge CO2 emissions but that's a different problem).
ansgri|1 month ago
eru|1 month ago
(Note: I specifically say for the local. I'm not talking about global CO2 levels here. That's a different topic.)
dmos62|1 month ago
melting_snow|1 month ago
victorbjorklund|1 month ago
nuthje|1 month ago
krige|1 month ago
piokoch|1 month ago
Which is interesting, as either air quality does not matter that much or those data are just bogus.
Well, air quality matters probably, so we are left with the data. Let's check what is the origin of this information: https://www.iqair.com/poland/lesser-poland-voivodeship/krako...
6 stations. One from "corporate contributor" named Arek (common Polish first name, short from Arkadiusz so does not look like a big corp) plus 5 other individual contributors.
What equipment those 6 stations have? No idea. Are the instruments calibrated properly? No idea. Are they placed in the right spot, not on the balcony near the chimney? No idea. Are they placed evenly across Krakow to give reliable city-wide data? Looking on the provided locations - not really.
Iqair seems to "crowdsource" their measurements so they get "crowdsourced" data, which can be total crap. Do they even verify those data? How? No idea.
madjam002|1 month ago
If not IQAir, you can use Windy, WAQI, Airly (founded in Krakow, so lots of sensors here).
I am in Krakow right now and my IKEA sensor is reading 183 µg/m³ when I put it outdoors. On a good day it's normally less than 5.
Youden|1 month ago
So the editorialized title is incorrect. It's not "top 5 worst air quality worldwide", it's only top 5 in this list, which is a small subset of the world's cities.
It's a Swiss company but even Switzerland's largest city, Zürich, is missing.
China sure as hell has more than 8 cities and Russia more than 2.
exitb|1 month ago
scyzoryk_xyz|1 month ago
But you are correct I believe (hailing from Wro here) - there have been many countermeasures implemented and cities are packed with sensors. Only so much can be done.
jwr|1 month ago
dmytrokow|1 month ago
That's just yet another coping mechanism, I believe.
I lived in Krakow in ~2015, and live there now. It's the same. It smells the same, it looks the same, the polution levels are the same, and the number of days like today in a year is the same.
Oleh_h|1 month ago
teekert|1 month ago
comboy|1 month ago
I wonder though how do they compute the number (is it average across points measured in the city?). Because within city borders air quality varies wildly. There are some regions where it is actually pretty good.
jillesvangurp|1 month ago
The point of pollution is that it stinks (literally) and is bad for your health. Pollution kills people, shortens expected life times by years, causes respiratory issues for children, etc. Those are some good reasons to do something about it. There are good alternatives to coal at this point. Mostly this is just inefficient legacy infrastructure that we pay extra for to keep going to "protect jobs". From a macro economic point of view, that stopped making sense quite some time ago. Which is why coal plants are going extinct in a lot of places.
Even gas plants are a big improvement. I think of them as a stop gap solution that might be economically risky long term. Wind, solar, and batteries are cheaper. Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean). However, gas plants are undeniably a pragmatic compromise between cost and polluting. Unlike nuclear they are easy to switch off when not needed and can act as a fallback solution when wind/solar fall short in the winter. LNG is not cheap though and that makes gas plants long term risky as renewables plus batteries marginalizes their use to the point where they are deeply unprofitable.
There's a base load argument that often pops up in these discussions. Gas plants are nice because they can be switched off. Base load is basically the type of power that is expensive to switch off. Mainly coal and nuclear. This is actually problematic in a grid with a lot of intermittent power supply (wind/solar). Dispatchability is more important. Gas power is good because it is rapidly dispatchable. Batteries act as a buffer and minimize the need for gas plants to run.
Moldoteck|1 month ago
Ren per unit are cheap but transition will still cost a lot, incl all relevant infra around them. Some countries can afford going faster, like Germany, others will go slower. It's hard to say now how things will pan out due to increasing geopolitical instability which can cause funds reallocation for say military or other sectors
shevy-java|1 month ago
> Maybe with some nuclear here and there (expensive but clean).
And that's also made up. What is "clean" here? Radioactivity? Also if you refer to carbon cost, you have to calculate in EVERYTHING including mining and transport. So no, it is not clean - that is a lobbyist dream to claim otherwise.
pranavkpr|1 month ago
impish9208|1 month ago
tsoukase|1 month ago
0rzech|1 month ago
The common argument is that people use bad furnaces or burn bad fuel or trash out of poverty, but far too often the actual cause is mentality and not financial issues.
Smog kills around 40,000 Polish people each year. [1] It was reported in 2025 to be 20 times more than in car accidents. [2]
On the bright side, industrial and post-apo art fans can wear breathing masks in Poland without even pretending.
[1] https://pulsmedycyny.pl/medycyna/choroby-ukladu-oddechowego/...
[2] https://www.infor.pl/prawo/nowosci-prawne/6826105,umiera-od-...
harmonics|1 month ago
SO₂ pollution is also extreme, with levels of 1000 µg/m³ being exceeded on a regular basis, and 5000-8000 µg/m³ not unheard of. Yes, I am sure of these numbers, it's not a typo.
Right at this moment there's some wind and the pollution has somewhat subsided, but it won't last: it's an exception. For example, the average PM2.5 concentration over the last month is around 250 µg/m³, depending on the exact place.
We have extensive network of air sensors, but it's not currently public (it only started working a couple of months ago and is in the process of being made available to the public). I can only recommend looking at https://aqicn.org, which has much better coverage than IQAir, and speaking of our country specifically, it collects data from our old sensors provided by the government.
Disregard anything that looks suspicious (some of the sensors are not working and show zero levels of pollution -- they're simply broken).
My city is the worst one, but actually most Central Asian cities have terrible air quality due to harsh winters and outdated heating methods with zero emission control. Much, much worse than anything in Poland or Europe generally. You won't see them on IQAir because AFAIK they mostly collect data through their own sensors, which are expensive and not used here.
mykowebhn|1 month ago
docdeek|1 month ago
rfarley04|1 month ago
It's much better this year but incredibly hard to police since officials often don't have jurisdiction where the pm2.5 originated, before getting trapped in the inversion
brokegrammer|1 month ago
agravier|1 month ago
SkiFire13|1 month ago
avaika|1 month ago
However, I regularly see a lot of Balkan cities hitting the top 10. Sarajevo was #1 quite a few times. Not sure whether it's really worse than Delhi or Beijing, but sometimes it's really really bad. Like, if you imagine the most smoky bar you ever visited, where you see nothing but the cigarette smoke and can't breath. That's how you feel on the street.
nipperkinfeet|1 month ago
niemandhier|1 month ago
I’d hazard to guess that part of it is that they accept being on the “don’t over regulate, but grow” path.
0rzech|1 month ago
SenpaiHurricane|1 month ago
anilakar|1 month ago
danburzo|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
danduma|1 month ago
melting_snow|1 month ago
schiffern|1 month ago
"Krakow’s pollution stems from a mix of local and regional sources. A primary culprit is domestic heating, the burning of coal and wood in older, inefficient household boilers and stoves remains widespread in the Małopolska region (1).
Car traffic also adds nitrogen oxides and fine particulates, exacerbated by an ageing vehicle fleet. Topography and meteorology worsen the problem, Krakow sits in a basin-like region prone to temperature inversions and limited ventilation, allowing pollutants to accumulate.
Additionally, emissions drift in from surrounding municipalities and industrial zones, making regional coordination crucial to air quality. Despite a solid-fuel ban in the city since 2019 and the replacement of many coal boilers, compliance is uneven and some residents still use banned fuel."
kubb|1 month ago
I’d maybe include accurate measurements. The government isn’t trying to hide that and doesn’t have the means to, and highly quality sensors are widespread.
gregorygoc|1 month ago
egorfine|1 month ago
PunchyHamster|1 month ago
dwedge|1 month ago
scotty79|1 month ago
lostlogin|1 month ago
Looks like it clears up quite quickly.
fragebogen|1 month ago
sevennull|1 month ago
janlucien|1 month ago
[deleted]
thala|1 month ago
[deleted]
shevy-java|1 month ago
madjam002|1 month ago
This is about air quality, not waste on the streets.