By Christa Hasenkopf
What if one of the highest-return investments on the planet wasn’t artificial intelligence (AI) but clean air?
Air pollution quietly erases about 6% of global gross domestic productevery year, roughly three to six times the annual economic growth the world expects from AI. Yet, despite the scale of an issue that leaches more years from our lives than HIV/AIDs and malaria combined, less than 0.1% of global philanthropy is devoted to cleaning up the air.
Our new analysis from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago shows that in at least 83 countries, annual investments as small as $50,000-100,000 could shift national clean air trajectories, if they are directed to high agency leaders closest to the problem.
Some of the most outsized opportunities for clean air impact are in Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Guatemala.
Together, nearly 3 billion people live in these 83 countries, breathing air that exceeds World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines by more than four times on average.
Our analysis also finds that the global clean air landscape has become more fragile this year. In early 2025, the US State Department shut down its overseas air monitoring programme, instantly removing 97% of reference-grade monitors from the highest-opportunity countries we identified.
Thirty-six nations – home to 3.4 billion people – lost public access to their only high-quality source of air quality data overnight.
Data: A bottleneck for global clean air
Monitoring the air does not, by itself, make it cleaner. But data is a necessary prerequisite for nearly every serious clean air policy action, from policy creation to implementation. Without data, it is difficult for governments to prioritize the issue, let alone set and enforce standards and understand progress on mitigation measures.
Health systems cannot track exposure. And citizens cannot see – let alone act on – the pollution harming them.
When you look at the scale of global disparities in air quality monitoring, it becomes clear why even a single well-placed effort can matter. In countries like Norway, air pollution accounts for virtually zero lost life-years relative to WHO guidelines. By our recent count from data available on OpenAQ, there were 66 high-quality air quality monitors in Norway.
In contrast, Bangladesh, Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are losing a combined 1.3 billion life-years to air pollution relative to WHO guidelines. Yet today, not one of these three countries containing 300 million lives has a single reference-grade air quality monitor reporting fully open data to the public.
With gaps this wide between harm and measurement, it becomes intuitive why a single data-generating effort can begin to shift a national clean-air trajectory.
Where small investments matter most
In our analysis, we sought to answer a practical question: in which countries could a modest amount of funding unlock outsized national progress on clean air? To do so, we integrate three factors:
- Health burden of air pollution in a country.
- Absence of existing data and policy infrastructure.
- Signals of existing local engagement.