It’s definitely not one of the ‘Top Ten’ lists you’re likely to be campaigning for, but independent environment group The Blacksmith Institute announced their top ten worst polluted places list on Wednesday.

The list contains regions from seven countries, affecting more than 12 million people, according to the research done by Blacksmith with Green Cross in Switzerland. Those 12 million people mentioned are well open to respiratory diseases such as asthma, as well as birth defects and premature death.

"These places are sapping the strength of the populations around them, and it’s not rocket science to fix them," Richard Fuller, the nonprofit group’s founder and director told reporters on a conference call.

What can help those situations? Political will, technology and funds, but all of these things are lacking in locations that include four regions of Russia, two former Soviet states, two regions of China and two of India.

In alphabetical order, the top ten places are:

• Sumgayit, Azerbaijan;
• Linfen, China;
• Tianying, China;
• Sukinda, India;
• Vapi, India;
• La Oroya, Peru;
• Dzerzhinsk, Russia;
• Norilsk, Russia;
• Chernobyl, Ukraine;
• Kabwe, Zambia.

The methodology behind the scoring focused more on scale and toxicity of the pollution, and the numbers of people affected and at risk. It also identified three key factors: mining, unregulated industries, and Cold War-era pollution (notably significant at Chernobyl, number 9 on the list).

None of the locations in the top ten are major cities or capitals, and none are tourist destinations. All were relatively remote, and thus suffered from a lack of enforcement and pollution controls.

Examples include Tianying, which is home to a massive lead industry that produces half of China’s lead requirements. Vapi was described as a region "overwhelmed by industrial estates — more than fifty poison the local soils and groundwater with pesticides, PCBs, chromium, mercury, lead, and cadmium. Mercury in Vapi’s groundwater is 96 times higher…" than the World Health Organization’s standards.

An interesting note from the report, though, shed some unexpected light on to the province of Tianjin, after the authors mistook Tianjin for Tianying.

"Tianjin has China’s leading lead production bases, contributing to lead poisoning and various disorders and illnesses in children," read the caption underneath a photograph portraying the city’s port and rising skyline. But the Chinese reports cited by the announcement referred to Tianying Town in impoverished Anhui province, some 750 km (460 miles) south of Tianjin.

Regardless of where the polluting takes place, it is a sad fact of life for the Chinese people that pollution is everywhere. Some 460,000 Chinese die each year from direct causes related to breathing dirty air and drinking polluted water, the World Bank estimates.

Developed Western countries such as the US were not on the list, and an additional "Dirty Thirty" focused on central Asia, with a few outliers. Thankfully, carefully monitored regulation across the developed world has begun to cut down on such emissions, even though products that are brought in to countries such as America are producing pollution at their point of origin.

China has begun to implement regulation as well; however, with a third of the world’s population within its borders, and a political mess that the Americans couldn’t hope to achieve on their worst day, it will be a long time before the mass of pollution that has incited panic across the country will be brought under control.

One promise that China is already failing to meet is their proposal to cut industrial pollutants by 10 percent between 2006 and 2010: they failed to meet last year’s goal. One can only hope that, with the rise in global warming, and the continued effects being seen across their own country, they will come to their senses and put more effort behind reaching these goals.

China’s recent accession to the proposal raised at the APEC meeting in Sydney this past month will hopefully change this trend, but we won’t know whether they are able, or even willing, to meet these standards for years.

We can only hope.

The Blacksmith Institute

Green Cross

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