When people understand that the air they breathe is harmful to their health, they can take steps to reduce the hazard by purchasing air purifiers, wearing masks, limiting time outdoors, and using the data to inform policy actions. Air quality monitors can give them this information at a local level, daily. Yet nearly 70 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where fewer than three monitors exist for every one million people, which is the minimum monitoring recommended by environmental regulatory agencies in the US and Europe—regions that have largely managed to reduce pollution and prevent it from rising again. This leaves nearly 5 billion people around the world, many of whom live in some of the world’s most polluted countries, without access to adequate information about their air.
Last year, EPIC launched the Air Quality Fund to support local groups and organizations in installing air quality monitors, sharing open data, and using that data to further national-level impact. The Fund is supporting 31 awardees in government, academia, and civil society who are installing more than 700 monitors across 19 countries where citizens are losing a combined 2 billion life years due to particulate pollution. But, more work remains. These 19 countries are part of a cohort of 83 countries that the Fund points to as having a “higher opportunity” to generate impact if given a small investment toward building up their air quality infrastructure. The 2.9 billion people living in these countries are seeing their lives cut short by about 1.7 years on average or a total 4.9 billion life years, according to the Air Quality Life Index (AQLI).
The Air Quality Fund is already showing the impact a small investment can have. In Africa, an awardee in the Democratic Republic of Congo has installed the country’s only air quality monitoring network sharing data with the public, while an awardee in The Gambia helped spur a landmark environmental bill thanks in part to information generated by the new monitoring network. This is important progress for a continent where, in the most polluted regions, air pollution takes a greater toll on life expectancy than well-known killers like HIV/AIDS, malaria and unsafe water.