A first-of-its-kind fund providing grants for air pollution monitors in countries with low air quality data has been set up by a research institute with a $1.5 million philanthropic gift. While the news has been welcomed, some question where the government investment is for such a significant health and climate issue.
The EPIC Air Quality Fund was launched last month by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, or EPIC, with a $1.5 million grant from U.S.-based social enterprise Open Philanthropy. It aims to fund local groups and organizations to install air quality monitors and provide communities with open data on air pollution that can then be used to push for high-level action to improve air quality.
“[Air pollution] has a much stronger impact on life expectancy than HIV or malaria so there should be a lot more attention on it,” said Achim Haug, founder and CEO of Airgradient, a Thailand-based air quality monitoring company that shares open-source hardware design for monitors.
As it stands, over 7 million people die each year from diseases related to toxic air pollution, such as lung cancer, respiratory infection, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. This is more than the number of deaths caused by HIV/AIDS and malaria combined yet these diseases have their own dedicated multilateral fund in the form of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, supported by governments, while another exists for vaccines via Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Historically, experts say such financial investment has been lacking for air pollution; an issue that cuts across both health and environment.
“When you look at the impact both in terms of the number of deaths, but also the huge impact that air pollution is having on climate change, the potential for climate mitigation there, it seems really underfunded,” said Rosie Childs, global advocacy lead at the Clean Air Fund, a small philanthropic initiative focused on air quality action. Toxic air sources often are responsible for high carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to climate change.
Between 2015 and 2021, only 1% of any international development funding and 2% of public climate finance was dedicated to tackling air pollution. Of the philanthropic funding available for this issue, 60% goes to Europe, the United States, and Canada yet it is Latin America, Africa, and Asia where 96% of life years are lost due to air pollution.
The EPIC Air Quality Fund aims to change this by focusing on expanding access to air quality data to 1 billion people living in countries with little to no air quality data by 2030.
The value of data as an investment
The idea, explained Christa Hasenkopf, director of the clean air program at EPIC, is that giving the public access to information on the levels of pollution in a country will catalyze conversations and put social and political pressure on governments to take action.
In Thailand for example, a Clean Air Bill is currently being considered that would tax significant polluters and establish a dedicated clean air agency to raise awareness of the health impacts.
As it stands, some 1 billion people live in a country where the government isn’t monitoring air quality. Air pollution is typically caused by transport, household fuels for cooking, coal-fired power plants, agriculture, and waste burning. In 2023, the worst polluted countries were Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Tajikistan, and Burkina Faso.
“You can’t mitigate what you cannot measure,” said Nepal-based Bhupesh Adhikary, senior air quality specialist at The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development. But setting up robust systems in which to monitor pollution levels and the impacts of any potential efforts to mitigate it costs money which is hard to find, he explained.
EPIC’s fund, which he hopes to support governments in applying for, will offer grants to 10 local organizations, such as universities, governments, nonprofits, and for-profits, to install air quality monitors that will then upload data on a public and free platform. Organizations will receive either a $50,000 grant for projects involving lower-cost sensors or $75,000 for higher quality monitors.
“Then the larger piece is they also need to find some way to drive a national level change with that data,” said Hasenkopf, explaining that this might include working with a legal team to develop a national open-data policy or with pharmacists to push for an air-quality standard to be implemented. Grantees will be supported over an 18-month period by the EPIC team.
While EPIC estimates it would take $4 million to $8 million a year to close the global air quality data gaps, this fund is a step in the right direction, according to Hasenkopf. It is her hope that other organizations may also be encouraged to contribute.
“We believe this Fund leverages an outsized but rarely realized philanthropic opportunity to make air quality publicly accessible in countries with negligible monitoring data,” Santosh Harish, a program officer leading grantmaking in environmental health at Open Philanthropy, said in a statement. The organization primarily gives grants related to but not exclusive to health. Together with Amazon Web Services, it provided EPIC with $140,000 earlier this year to pilot the fund in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, and Argentina.
“Improved measurement increases the chance of government and public engagement with the problem, and could lead to improved air quality levels over the long term,” said Harish.
Countries such as Japan and China took action to improve their air quality after the public demanded change; something which they needed data to do. Following a drastic drop in toxic air pollutants, China is now being hailed as the world’s fastest country in improving air quality.
But Sumi Mehta, vice president of environmental, climate and urban health at Vital Strategies, believes there is already enough data available on the prevalence and the health impacts of the pollution for countries to act. “That’s something that we don’t need to wait before we start moving on this issue,” she said.
For Adhikary though, while the scale of the problem might be understood, data systems are needed to examine the situation over time, “which can then lead to a sustainable, more evidence-driven mitigation methods.”
The bottleneck to funding
The creation of the fund follows the adoption in March of a U.N. resolution committing countries to promoting regional cooperation on air pollution, as well as a call from the World Health Organization in June for governments to invest more in research and education about clean air and pollution. At the COP 28 U.N. climate summit, Our Common Air, a global commission made up of experts, was launched with the aim of bringing together leaders across various sectors to propel action on clean air. One of its goals is to push for financial support from public and private sources.
Yet the problem, according to Finn Jarle Rode, executive director of The Hepatitis Fund, which launched in 2019 and has yet to receive a substantial government donation, is that “governments are at a standstill, which means basically retracting or giving less.” Amid an economic crunch since COVID-19, many governments have less to invest into cross-border funding mechanisms.
The main issue for Haug, however, is the perception that poor air quality is a local rather than a global issue with the narrative often focusing on one-off localized events such as wildfires in the U.S. or agricultural burning in Thailand. This differs from the conversation around climate change, he said, which is spoken about as a global issue supported by international legally binding treaties, such as the Paris Agreement.
But in finding ways to improve air quality — by switching from coal power plants to solar energy or reducing transport emissions, for example — people’s lives can be saved while improving the environment, he explained.
“Governments haven’t fully appreciated that cleaning our air is a critical tool that can address just that host of interconnected issues, like climate change, public health, inequality, and actually that’s a huge economic benefit from cleaning the air as well,” agreed Childs, who believes it’s that interconnectedness that has allowed it to “fall between the cracks.”
“No one minister wants to take it on because they’re not necessarily going to benefit themselves,” Childs added.
Citizens and NGOs in several countries such as Germany, Japan, and Thailand have already filed lawsuits against the governments for failing to uphold residents’ right to access clean air.
Mehta believes there is hope, however, as more governments give increasing interest to the climate and health intersection. At COP 28, for example, $1 billion from various donors was pledged for climate and health.
But it doesn’t necessarily have to mean finding new funding, said Childs. “Look at the existing development or climate funding and ask how can that be used best?” she suggested, explaining that if there is funding going to maternal and newborn health, air quality should just be incorporated into the project design. “When we start to see that whole government approach, we’ll hopefully start to see some money flowing through.”