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.