Two countries as far apart as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Bolivia have a common environmental and health problem: data on the quality of the air their citizens breathe is practically non-existent. The situation is the same in 40% of the world’s countries, according to the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago (EPIC). For this reason, EPIC has just launched a new fund of 1.5 million dollars that seeks to bring its new air quality monitors to “some of the most polluted communities on the planet” so that they have access to open data on pollution. The project also has an ambitious goal: to benefit one billion people with this data by 2030.
Christa Hasenkopf, director of EPIC’s Clean Air Program, notes that about 838 million people breathe air that is four times above the World Health Organization’s safe levels of particulate matter pollution with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less (so-called PM 2.5 pollution). “Research tells us that a single monitor can have a huge impact,” says Hasenkopf from Munich, Germany.
According to the researcher, air pollution is “the greatest external threat to human life expectancy.” EPIC claims that the impact of this pollution on life expectancy is “comparable to smoking and more than three times higher than alcohol consumption.”
The research centre emphasises that funding for the fight against air pollution is uneven: “Europe, the United States and Canada only contribute 4% of the years of life lost worldwide due to this pollution, but receive 60% of the philanthropic funds to combat it.” Africa, at the other end of the spectrum, receives “half or even less” of this funding, which has a direct impact on the lack of data. According to EPIC information, only 19% of governments in Latin America, 7% in Asia and 4% in Africa provide their citizens with open data on air quality. “Without information on how pollution affects local communities, it is difficult to call for change or generate policies,” the institute says.
“What makes this fund special is that the call is global, giving preference to what we call ‘countries with greater opportunities’,” explains the director of the Clean Air Program. These are countries “with high levels of air pollution,” according to satellite data, but with “little or no data” on air quality generated on the ground. “This is the type of information that is needed for countries to move towards cleaner air,” says Hasenkopf, who highlights that they are seeking alliances with governments, other research centers and NGOs to meet their goal of covering one billion people in six years.
Hasenkopf says she has witnessed the impact of air quality data in countries such as China and Mongolia, where once they started measuring and publicly sharing measurement information there was a “massive impact at a national level” on environmental and health decision-making. “How this data translates into improvement varies from place to place, but having it seems to catalyze public interest and political will to address the problem,” says the EPIC researcher. The team wants to emulate these success stories in other countries where they believe there is a huge opportunity for benefits.
In Asia, Latin America and Africa, significant air pollution is known to occur from satellite data. Satellite data is, according to Hasenkopf, “excellent for getting an overview of air pollution,” but ground-based monitors “are better for capturing real-time, long-term air quality at a given location, which is what is needed to formulate and direct policy.”
In Spain, the Ministry for Ecological Transition collects air pollution statistics and publishes the data in the National Air Quality Index (ICA). This index uses real-time data from monitoring stations, which are supplemented by data from the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring System .
The ICA defines six categories of air quality : good, reasonably good, regular, unfavorable, very unfavorable, and extremely unfavorable. According to the real-time viewer that the Ministry has available online, most population centers in the country have “regular” air quality. The north of Spain, however, has better quality on average, with more locations rated as having “good” air.
Monitoring air quality in regions with little or no infrastructure also poses logistical difficulties, but the director of the Clean Air Program believes that to overcome these challenges they must support “local agents” with whom they will implement the monitors in each country. “We believe that local agents have the knowledge and experience necessary to successfully carry out these projects,” she says. At EPIC, they see the involvement of communities in places affected by pollution as a key point, so that they can be part of the decision-making once the data is available.
Asked whether the goal of benefiting one billion people is too ambitious, Hasenkopf says that it is actually too low “given the scale of the problem”: “Research shows that it can take several years of generating and sharing this data before progress is made towards cleaner air. Our goal is very modest.”