By Christa Hasenkopf
Via New York Times
On June 7 last year, the skies across New York City and large swaths of the state turned hazy from wildfire smoke blowing in from Canada. Gov. Kathy Hochul warned of an “emergency situation” and cautioned residents to stay indoors. In the city, schools canceled activities, libraries closed early, and a Yankees game was postponed.
It was the most polluted day in the city since record-keeping began in 1999. The air quality index, a composite of five pollutants, skyrocketed to over 400; above 300 is considered hazardous. Most alarming, the level of fine particulate matter, which is an especially dangerous component of the index because the tiny particles of smoke, soot and other pollutants penetrate deep into the lungs, was the highest recorded in any city in the world on that day and three times as much as the federal health standard.
For New York City, this was an anomaly. The city’s air quality is generally pretty good. But that is not the case for hundreds of cities around the world. For them, many days are like what New York City residents experienced that day last June. Or often worse.
The Air Quality Life Index at the University of Chicago, which measures the impact of air pollution on life expectancy, shows that people living in the most polluted places on Earth breathe air that has six times as much pollution as the air breathed by people in the least polluted places — and those in the most polluted places are seeing their lives cut short by more than two years because of it. An estimated 8.1 million people globally died in 2021 from the health impacts of breathing dirty air, according to a 2024 report by Health Effects Institute and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Private philanthropy could do much to turn the corner on this problem in some of the most polluted parts of the planet. But just an average $41.3 million in known philanthropic funds are devoted to air pollution each year, according to a recent report by the Clean Air Fund, a philanthropic group based in London. That is less than 1 percent of the more than $5 billion spent annually by one major funder, the Global Fund, to combat malaria, H.I.V./AIDS and tuberculosis.
This is especially disconcerting because particulate matter in air pollution has become the world’s largest contributor to the global disease burden — a metric quantifying premature death and sickness — and one of the greatest threats to life expectancy, outstripping the impacts of malaria, H.I.V./AIDS and transportation injuries combined. Polluted air does not just cut off a few years at the end of a long life. It is the second highest risk of death for children 5 and under.
Europe, the United States and Canada are barely affected by the health impacts of air pollution when compared with the rest of the world. But they receive roughly 60 percent of the philanthropic funds devoted to combating it. Africa is home to five of the top 10 most polluted countries. From 2015 through 2022, the entire continent received an average of $238,000 per year in philanthropic grants aimed at reducing air pollution.
Data — or, more precisely, a lack of data — is the most immediate problem. The paucity of data makes it difficult to stir public opinion, develop policy or measure progress. It also makes it hard to attract funding. But when air quality data is available, pollution declines. And when air quality improves, decades of research make clear that people live longer, healthier lives. Yet, 39 percent of the world’s countries aren’t producing air quality data for their citizens. Those countries are also some of the most polluted.
A recent study showed that when American embassies installed air pollution monitors at some of their locations and began sharing the real-time air quality data publicly, pollution declined and led to decreases in premature mortality, suggesting that local governments and perhaps residents took steps to reduce pollution once they learned of it.
From my perspective as the director of the clean air program at the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute, perhaps the most impressive turnaround was in Beijing, where the United States Embassy, in 2008, began tweeting hourly levels of fine particulates from a monitor on the embassy’s roof. I and others believe the resulting public pressure to reduce air pollution helped lead the government to lay out a plan to do so in 2013. Billions of dollars were spent to reduce pollution countrywide, and by 2022, particulate pollution in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region had declined by 45 percent.
The lack of basic air quality monitoring in some of the world’s most polluted places presents a huge philanthropic opportunity. From interviews with local air quality experts and clean air advocates, we estimate that annual investments of $50,000 to $100,000 per country could support long-term air quality monitoring efforts.
In total, it would take a global investment of a mere $4 million to $8 million a year to support local organizations already poised to address country-level air quality data gaps. Together, they could provide a billion people with access to such data. We are working to connect those groups to philanthropies through a new fund we have created that will raise money from private donors and then dispense it.
If even one relatively small country like Guatemala, home to 18 million people, were to benefit from such data infrastructure support, eventually spurring even a modest reduction in pollution levels, the avoided costs of caring for people sickened by breathing dirty air would outweigh the global investment in air quality data.
Progress can be made, and it has — in Beijing, Tokyo, Berlin, Los Angeles and other cities. Establishing national air quality standards, enforcing those standards and monitoring progress at the local level was crucial to reducing air pollutants at their source in those cities. Achieving that success, though, requires air quality data over long periods.
Few global health issues can be alleviated with an investment of just a few million dollars a year. But gathering air quality data in some of the world’s most polluted countries is one of them.
Christa Hasenkopf is the director of the clean air program at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and oversees the EPIC Air Quality Fund.