EPIC’s 2025 Clean Air Investment Update

A Tougher Landscape — and an Even Greater Opportunity

Air pollution is the world’s largest external threat to human health, shortening lives more than diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria, combined – and translating into global economic damage equivalent to the impact of 1.5 COVIDs each year.

Yet, air pollution remains severely underfunded relative to this harm with less than 0.1 percent of global philanthropy devoted to the issue. Given this poorly resourced problem space, it was our hypothesis that even modest investments, strategically made, could yield outsized, country-level results. Since launching the EPIC Air Quality Fund last year, we now have clear evidence that this approach can indeed drive national-level clean air impacts.

Our 2025 Clean Air Investment Update reveals an even tougher clean air landscape with the closure of the U.S. State Department monitoring program earlier this year, leaving 36 countries – 3.4 billion people – without publicly accessible reference-grade air quality data. This tougher landscape translates into an even more important, timely opportunity for philanthropic investment.

In 2023, we created the Opportunity Score, which pinpointed where catalytic investments could be made to deliver the greatest impact for cleaner air. This original Opportunity Score analysis posited that in many countries, $50–100k per year – comparable to the cost of a single non-profit staff position in the U.S. – could spark national clean air impacts that could ultimately restore years of life in many countries. That insight led to the launch of the EPIC Air Quality Fund in 2024.

To drive the strategy of the EPIC Air Quality Fund’s second call for proposals in 2026 and also serve as a public good for the philanthropic community, this 2025 Clean Air Investment Update, which displays an update of countries’ Opportunity Scores, builds on our original work with new data, refined methodology, and fresh evidence from the field. Our findings are below. The methodology, detailed analysis, underlying code and data sources are accessible here. To note, as with any effort to simplify a complex global challenge, this Opportunity Score is necessarily imperfect — it cannot capture every nuance, but we hope it provides a useful starting lens for philanthropic decision-making.

Orders of Magnitude Off: Global Air Pollution Funding

Sources: HIV/AIDS and Malaria funding data – The Global Fund Data Explorer; Air Pollution funding data – The Clean Air Fund’s 2024 report; Loss of life expectancy data for HIV/AIDS and Malaria are calculated from the Global Burden of Disease level-2 causes and risks data; Loss of life expectancy for Air Pollution are calculated from data from the AQLI 2025 Update

2025 Clean Air Investment Map: Where Small Investments Can Drive National Clean Air Action

By the numbers:

  • 83 countries received “higher opportunity” scores for where a modest investment of 50-100k USD could result in national clean air impacts.
  • 2.9 billion people live in these 83 countries and are exposed to more than 4 times the WHO guideline for air pollution, removing an estimated 1.7 years of average life expectancy, more than the toll of HIV/AIDS and malaria combined.
  • 3 African countries top the list: Angola, Zambia, and Burundi. None have reference-grade air quality data monitoring, little policy, and practically zero dollars in philanthropic support, but local capacity and interest exists.
  • 46 higher opportunity countries receive less than $100,000 annually from international donors to address air pollution. In fact, the combined total available funding in these countries is less than $190,000 per year.
  • 97 percent of reference-grade monitors in the highest opportunity countries were lost earlier this year, when the US State Department shut down their program. Thirty-six countries in total – representing 3.4 billion citizens – now have no reference-grade air quality monitors.

Small Investments Based on the Opportunity Score are Already Leading to National Clean Air Impacts

When we released the first Opportunity Score in 2023, the EPIC Air Quality Fund did not yet exist. Today it does, and with 31 awardees across 19 countries – prioritized using that 2023 analysis – we are already seeing how modest investments can deliver national clean air impact:

  • For the first time in The Gambia, government agencies are using on-the-ground air quality evidence to generate new clean air policies. For example, Permian Health’s collaboration with the Gambian Government has resulted in the drafting of landmark environmental legislation that has made its way through the Gambian parliament. Previously, the partnership established the first reference-grade air quality monitoring in the country.
  • Democratic Republic of the Congo: Awardee WASARU, partnering with Columbia University, has launched the only open air quality monitoring network sharing in the country – Africa’s most polluted. The government has consequently requested to engage with WASARU to inform its policies.
  • The Urban Unit, a Pakistan government-related entity, has launched the country’s largest air quality monitoring network across nearly a dozen cities, helping the government share such data in an open way for the first time. In Malawi, the government is now producing nationwide air quality bulletins for the first time making use of data produced in-country. The Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences is running the only monitoring network in the country providing open data.
  • Ghana’s Environmental Protection Authority is generating and sharing data for the first time in a fully open way. This effort has helped implement brand new air quality management legislation and is building momentum for future support.

A Fragile Moment for Clean Air — and the Chance for Outsized Impact

Since our 2023 Opportunity Score analysis, the global landscape for clean air action has become both more urgent and more fragile. In early 2025, the U.S. State Department shut down its overseas air monitoring program, instantly removing 97 percent of reference-grade monitors across the countries we have identified as “high or medium-high opportunity.” Thirty-six countries in total, containing 3.4 billion citizens, lost public access to reference-grade monitoring from their country when the program shut down. This has consequently left entire regions without official data, underscoring just how precarious global air quality infrastructure remains. At the same time, this new landscape makes an even larger opportunity for modest – $50-100k, strategic investments in locally-owned efforts to have outsized, durable clean air impacts.

Interested in partnering with EPIC Air Quality Fund? Reach out to EPIC’s Clean Air Program Director, Christa Hasenkopf: chasenkopf@uchicago.edu

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