382 organizations in 83 countries apply to drive national-level policy change with open air quality data

Our 2026 call for applications attracted 382 complete applications from organizations working in 83 countries, a 19 percent increase from our first open round in 2025 (Figure 1). As in prior rounds, applicants are concentrated in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the regions where the burden of particulate pollution is greatest and where clean air infrastructure is thinnest (Figure 2).

Figure 1 – Number of Applicants by Country

Figure 2 – Number of 2026 EPIC AQ Fund Applicants by Region (n = 382)

Applicants overwhelmingly proposed work in countries where EPIC’s Opportunity Score signals the greatest potential for a small, well-targeted effort to drive national-level impact:

• High Opportunity: 243 applications (64 percent)
• Medium-High Opportunity: 100 applications (26 percent)
• Medium Opportunity: 35 applications (9 percent)
• Low Opportunity: 0 applications

Taken together, 90 percent of applicants are seeking to work in High or Medium-High Opportunity countries, where there is little to no government-produced PM2.5 data, weak or absent ambient air quality standards, and minimal international donor funding for outdoor air pollution. High and Medium-High Opportunity countries define the priority geography for the EPIC Air Quality Fund, as outlined in our 2025 Clean Air Investment Update.

Applicants come from a variety of sectors, including government

Applicants most frequently came from non-profit and academic institutions, with non-profits being the largest single category. Notably, 68 applicants—roughly 26 percent of those who indicated their entity-type—came from government entities. This included national-level regulatory bodies such as environmental management or protection authorities, as well as subnational bodies. This government interest signals continued unmet demand from governments themselves for support to build even the most basic air quality data infrastructure.

Figure 3 – Number of 2026 Applicants by Sector

Note: Of 265 of 382 applicants who specified sector, percentages do not/should not sum to 100% because multiple selections were allowed.

Most applicants are first-time project leads; support structures are essential. More than half of applicants—205 of 382, or 54 percent—indicated that this would be their first air quality project as a primary applicant or principal investigator. Another 101 (26 percent) have led one such project before, and 76 (20 percent) have led multiple. This distribution of air quality project leadership is consistent with the Fund’s design. By prioritizing applicants in countries that have historically received exceedingly few resources to support air quality work, we expect to reach a talent pool with deep technical interest but limited prior opportunity to lead. Across many technical fields, a pervasive labor division between Global South and Global North experts persists—driven in part by where funding, often originating from the Global North, is permitted to flow, alongside other systemic barriers.

The implication for the global clean air ecosystem is the same as in our prior round: realizing the potential of this applicant pool requires investment from EPIC—and the larger clean air community—in the structures that surround these projects. That includes flexible and straightforward award management processes, as well as access to professional networks that can greatly assist first-time primary investigators.

Most applicants plan to deploy low-cost monitors, with a significant share building hybrid networks

The EPIC Air Quality Fund is agnostic to the sensor type used by awardees. Applicants are free to propose whatever type they believe would best fit their purpose in helping them achieve their national level policy goals and also meet our open data guidelines, which aim to maximize the social benefit and usage of the data. The breakdown of the technology applicants propose to use:

•  Low-cost monitors only: 236 (62 percent)
• Hybrid networks (low-cost + reference-grade): 111 (29 percent)
• Reference-grade monitors only: 35 (9 percent)

The dominance of low-cost approaches reflects both cost realities and the maturation of the low-cost sensor market. The substantial hybrid share, nearly a third of applicants, points to the growing value the clean air community sees in using low-cost networks paired with reference-grade monitors acting as “anchors” to deliver both spatial coverage and data quality. Reference grade only proposals remain a small but meaningful slice, often linked to plans to stand up a country’s first sustained government-grade PM2.5 monitoring presence.

Nearly one in four applicants comes from a country with no government air quality monitoring network. Nearly half come from a country with no national PM2.5 standard. 76 applications come from 30 countries with neither a national PM2.5 standard nor any open government monitoring.

To see how closely this applicant pool maps onto the places where the need is greatest, we cross-referenced applicants’ countries against two external datasets: national PM2.5 standards and government monitoring and open-data status. Figure 4 shows applicants sorted by whether their country has a national PM2.5 standard and how openly (if at all) its government shares air quality data.

The state of applicants’ government-operated air quality networks in their country:

• No monitoring network: 90 applicants (24 percent)
• Monitoring network exists, but data not shared: 17 (4 percent)
• Partially open monitoring network: 230 (60 percent)
• Monitoring network exists and data openly shared: 45 (12 percent)

The fact that nearly a quarter of applicants come from countries with no government air quality monitoring at all, and many more from countries with only partially open data coverage, underscores the gap the Fund is designed to address. In these contexts, we find that a single well-supported in-country effort can have an outsized impact on policy. Meanwhile, 180 applicants—or 47 percent—come from countries that do not yet have a National PM2.5 Standard.

Figure 4 – Where Applicants’ Countries Fall on Clean Air Data and Policy Infrastructure

More than three quarters of 2026 applicants propose work in countries that lost public access to reference grade air quality monitoring data from the U.S. State Department monitoring program.

Reference grade air quality monitoring data is a gold standard source of air quality information for policy, researchers, and other clean air actors in a country. Such monitoring provides “ground truth” for calibrating other lower cost sensors and satellite-derived estimates of pollution, as well as helps establish credible long-term baselines of pollution levels. An important source of such gold standard data in high pollution, low data locations was the U.S. Department of State Monitoring program that operated for 17 years until the program was abruptly halted in early 2025.

In our latest call, 291 applicants—76 percent—proposed projects in countries that lost at least one reference-grade monitor operated by a U.S. Department of State Monitoring Program. In fact, in one-third of all countries from which we received applications, the dismantled State Department monitoring program provided the only reference grade open data source available.

During the application interview process, multiple applicants cited the loss of the monitors as a detriment to their work and the larger clean air efforts in their country. The work they propose can help reestablish an important air quality data baseline in which countries can have more data sovereignty and instrument ownership than the previous State Department monitoring program, which, while effective, proved a too brittle source of data for countries to rely on.

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