Off the news: Isles rank high in U.S. clean air report

Take a deep breath, and celebrate that two areas in Hawaii — urban Honolulu and Kahului, Maui — rank among the cleanest cities in the nation in the American Lung Association’s 2025 “State of the Air” report. That’s according to air quality data over a three-year period, 2021-23, that measured exposure to unhealthy levels of ground-level ozone air pollution (smog), and year-round and short-term spikes in particle pollution (soot).

The Hawaii findings were particularly gratifying, given that nationally, the report found that 156 million people (46%) are living in areas that had unhealthy levels of air pollution.