Mick Hartley

According to Forbes, Baku in Azerbaijan is the world’s dirtiest city.

Those Forbes lists in detail:

In Pictures: The World’s 25 Dirtiest Cities

In Pictures: The World’s Densest Cities

In Pictures: The World’s Heaviest-Smoking Countries

In Pictures: The 10 Most Polluted Places on Earth

In Pictures: The World’s Most Earthquake-Vulnerable Cities

In Pictures: World’s Most Endangered Destinations

From here:

To see which cities in the world were dirtiest, we turned to Mercer Human Resource Consulting’s 2007 Health and Sanitation Rankings. As part of their 2007 Quality of Life Report, they ranked 215 cities worldwide based on levels of air pollution, waste management, water potability, hospital services, medical supplies and the presence of infectious disease.

All cities are positioned against New York, the base city with an index score of 100. For the Health and Sanitation Rankings, the index scores range from the worst on the list–Baku, Azerbaijan, with a score of 27.6–to the best on the list–Calgary, Canada, with a score of 131.7.

Lead-poisoned air lands Dhaka, Bangladesh, the No. 2 spot on the list. Traffic congestion in the capital continues to worsen with vehicles emitting fatal amounts of air pollutants daily, including lead. The World Bank-funded Air Quality Management Project aims to help.

“Addressing air pollution is the easiest way to be able to fix someone’s well-being because we’re always breathing, and there are all sorts of harmful particulates in the air,” says Richard Fuller, founder of the New York-based Blacksmith Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to solving the pollution problems of the developing world. “In fact, the biggest pathway for lead poisoning is particulates in the air. So in areas with a lot of air pollution, shutting down the worst forces of these types of pollution really does make a difference.”

Nos. 3 and 4 on this year’s list are the capital cities of Madagascar and Haiti, respectively. Antananarivo, Madagascar and Port au Prince, Haiti, both face the challenge of a rapidly growing urban population and the ever-growing need for efficient water and waste management.

Mexico City, Mexico, ranks No. 5 on this year’s list. Residents can thank industrial and automobile emissions for air quality so bad that city ozone levels fail to meet World Health Organization standards an estimated 300 days of the year.

Here they’re surprised that Chinese cities didn’t feature more. Perhaps the data for China wasn’t available.