Christa Hasenkopf is a 2016 Echoing Green Fellow and co-founder of OpenAQ, the first open source, open air quality data platform for the world. OpenAQ’s goal is to enable science, influence policy, and empower the public in the fight against one of the biggest global health threats of our time. Follow OpenAQ on Twitter.
On Sunday, Beijing experienced its first of what will likely be many air quality alerts of the fall and winter seasons. The latest air quality alert puts limits on construction, farming, and recreational activities in and around the city. As fall slips into winter, it is highly probable Beijing will experience air quality that triggers even more severe alerts, further limiting outdoor activities, restricting vehicle transportation, and closing schools.
Beijing is not alone in the battle against air pollution. For billions of people, the onset of falling temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere is now ushering in the worst air of the year. In fact, 85 percent of the world’s population, including more than 99 percent of China and India’s citizens, live in regions with air quality that does not meet World Health Organization guidelines.
Over the course of this year alone, an estimated 5.5–7 million people will die from exposure to air pollution, making it the fourth highest-ranking risk factor for death, according to the Global Burden of Disease. Air pollution-related deaths outnumber those due to malaria and HIV/AIDS combined, and air pollution disproportionately affects those in developing countries.
This uneven distribution of healthy air across the world to breathe–air inequality–is one of the most pressing global public health crises of our time. But it is solvable. Examples of success abound from Bangkok to Santiago to Los Angeles. Often the keys to that success rest not in new technologies, but rather in data access and community engagement.
Air quality in the United States has demonstrably improved in the decades since the passage of the Clean Air Act, in part, because of scientifically-grounded standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The development of these standards relied on the scientific and policy communities’ access to open air quality data from the United States and other countries. In addition to transforming air standards in the United States, research based on these data has impacted international air quality guidelines and created a robust scientific understanding of how low air quality affects health. But in highly polluted regions around the world, huge, policy-relevant knowledge gaps remain as to how air quality impacts health. Open data, on a global scale, can help the international public health community fill these gaps.
Although Beijing and the rest of China continue to battle air quality, progress made so far has been driven by public access to data. The Chinese government has made public real-time air quality data available, leading to a proliferation of air quality apps, data-driven journalism, and research. In November 2010, differences between publicly reported data from the Chinese government and the US Embassy in Beijing sparked a vibrant public debate that helped prompt the Chinese government to deploy monitors measuring fine particulate matter (a more health-relevant pollutant parameter), across Beijing.
There are approximately 70 countries that generate 5–8 million publicly shared air quality data points online each day, but these data points are not currently available for easy, universal access. Each country shares data in a different format (sometimes several) and sometimes the data are shared temporarily on a website before they are updated with new values. In some countries, historical data are available online, in others you must request and possibly pay for them, and in many others, they are not available at all.
Our community, OpenAQ, saw this huge gap between the large amounts of air quality data generated by governments, researchers, and soon, citizen scientists using low-cost sensors, and the many sectors for the public good that could use their data to fight air inequality. To fill that gap, we built the first open-source platform that aggregates, universally formats, and shares real-time and historical air quality data from across the world. To date, we have amassed more than 24 million data points from 25 countries. Anyone can explore the data on the site and create visualizations that compare air quality across cities.
Members of our community have helped build and build off of our platform in ways that help fight air inequality in their communities. A journalist in Mongolia accessed data on OpenAQ to make startling comparisons between air quality in Beijing and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, a heavily smoke-polluted city. An app developer in Delhi has created a global air quality app that compares cities around the world. Individuals from Spain, the United States, and Mongolia have built open-source resources that help others access the data more easily, as well. In November, OpenAQ will hold a workshop in Delhi, convening open air quality enthusiasts, from software developers to journalists, to brainstorm new ways to tackle air quality issues and build resources that others can use in Delhi and around the world.
This fall, as air quality worsens over much of the Northern Hemisphere, air pollution may seem overwhelming for any one person to tackle. But our open data platform and, most importantly, our community are powerful new resources in the fight against air inequality.
This article is part of a series that showcases emerging leaders’ voices on a variety of issues related to social change. The opinions expressed in this article belong to the author(s). Echoing Green provides these leaders with financial and strategic support and leadership development. Learn more at echoinggreen.org.