Air pollution kills 8 million people per year, more than tobacco, alcohol or obesity. In urban areas in the Global South the air is dirtier than ever—in the developing megacities of Africa and south Asia, urbanisation and industrialisation are driving worsening pollution, causing economic harm, illness, and death, showing the need to improve air quality funding practices. Even as philanthropic spending on air quality has skyrocketed from $9 million in 2015 to $71 million in 2022 (the latest year for which data has been published), we haven’t made a dent in that trend.

To be clear, huge successes have been achieved by many organisations, chief among them the Clean Air Fund (CAF, where I was Head of Data until last year). We now have more data about air quality than ever before, and philanthropy has been central to that achievement. Low-cost sensor networks are now a mature technology, where once CIFF and Bloomberg funded the concept in the Breathe London network. Satellite-based monitoring has given us baseline data on pollution worldwide for the first time ever. And more data is freely available globally than ever before thanks to efforts like OpenAQ, funded from the start by CAF.

But that growth in measurement has not been matched by improvements in air quality management. We’ve made great strides in raw data, but data is not enough. It must be translated into effective policy, implemented fully and evaluated carefully before we can say we’ve made real change. And that takes time—much longer than typical philanthropic funding cycles allow.

The result has been that we fund exciting, innovative pilots and proof-of-concept projects with new technologies, but drop the ball when it comes to implementation in terms of air quality funding practices. There are lots of sensor networks out there sending their data into the void, or successful early intervention trials that never went mainstream, because attention faded and long-term plans were out of scope for the funding body. CAF’s 2024 report on air quality philanthropy showed that communication, events and awareness received 30 percent of total funding from 2015–2022, almost $100 million. Implementation, however, was the lowest funded project category.

Read the full article about philanthropy's air quality funding practices by Ruaraidh Dobson at Alliance Magazine.