How poverty is making air pollution worse in Chile’s Temuco
- Every winter, Temuco plunges to the bottom of global air quality rankings, as the city’s residents have no choice but to burn cheap firewood to keep warm
- ‘It’s like living in a city with permanent fog, except it’s chimney smoke,’ a resident says
Nestled in a valley in central Chile, near lakes and snowcapped mountains, sits one of the world’s most polluted cities.
June though August, when the Southern Hemisphere is in winter, thermometers in Temuco drop to as low as 4º Celsius (39º Fahrenheit). Poor temuquenses, as the city’s 220,000 residents are known, have no choice but to burn cheap – often wet – firewood to keep warm.
From the window of her living room, 60-year-old resident Patricia Bravo says she can sometimes only see half a block down the street in her Temuco neighbourhood. The rest is all grey smoke.
“It’s like living in a city with permanent fog, except it’s chimney smoke,” says Bravo, who’s lived there since she was a young girl. She is got used to itchy eyes and the smell of heavy smoke in her living room this winter, she says, even when her own chimney is dark and her windows are closed.
According to data compiled by Bloomberg Green and the non-profit OpenAQ, Temuco had the worst air quality in the world at least five days in the last eight weeks, including back-to-back on July 8 and 9.