Air for Tomorrow: Why Openness in Air Quality Research and Implementation Matters for Global Equity

that 99% of the worldwide inhabitants breathes air that exceeds WHO annual limits[1], inflicting $6 trillion in international yearly well being prices as per the World Financial institution[2], with 9 out of 10 deaths attributed to out of doors air air pollution in low- and middle-income international locations[3]. The present air high quality analysis and monitoring method faces points with proprietary fashions, closed datasets, and inaccessible analysis outputs. The huge scale of this socio-economic problem underpins the necessity for collaborative, scalable, and equitable options to deal with air air pollution, which has by no means been extra pressing.

The precept of Open Supply is usually a answer. As an alternative of maintaining vital data on air high quality information and strategies locked behind paywalls, with restrictive entry to proprietary algorithms and instruments, siloed air high quality databases, an open method is reworking how we analysis, perceive, and act on the air high quality[4]. This technique not solely makes the method extra inclusive but in addition makes it extra adaptable and clear. With this goal, we discover the worth of open approaches in air high quality science, why they’re essential for fairness and innovation, and the way they’re already reworking how we perceive and reply to environmental threats.

We at UNICEF Lao PDR Nation Workplace[5] have collaborated with UNICEF East Asia Pacific’s Frontier Information Lab, UNICEF Workplace of Innovation[6], and AQAI[7] to showcase the function of open-source applied sciences in air high quality monitoring.

Right here, we’re launching a multi-part weblog collection to grasp the world and worth of open approaches in air high quality science. We begin with how open-source information and instruments are utilized in air high quality monitoring. Later within the collection, we’ll do a deep dive into open-source modelling and share the expertise of how such programs may also help guarantee environmental justice.

On the technical aspect, we delve into the world of open supply, open information and, open strategies and supply a slice of how they’re utilized in real-world use instances for main humanitarian organisations, particularly UNICEF, the United Nations company for youngsters, working to guard the rights of each baby, particularly essentially the most deprived and people hardest to succeed in[8].

Open supply, open strategies, and open information are three interconnected pillars of openness in analysis and know-how:

Open Information: It refers to information that’s freely accessible, accessible, and reusable by anybody. This technique permits researchers, policymakers, and communities to construct on the identical proof base.
Open Strategies: The processes, algorithms, and workflows used to analyse or interpret that information are clear and shareable, so others can perceive, replicate, and enhance them.
Open Supply: The software program or instruments implementing these strategies are launched underneath open licenses, enabling anybody to examine, use, modify, and redistribute them.

So, how are they associated?

Open information gives the uncooked materials, open strategies outline how that materials is processed, and open supply ensures the instruments that perform these strategies are accessible and adaptable. Collectively, they create a clear, reproducible, and collaborative ecosystem for data creation.

The Case for Openness in Air High quality Science

1. Open Information: Breaking Obstacles to Entry

Entry to high-quality air air pollution information is the muse for analysis, public engagement, and evidence-based policymaking. But, in lots of areas, particularly throughout the World South, real-time or historic information is unavailable, locked behind paywalls, or shared solely via cumbersome bureaucratic channels.

Determine 2: OpenAQ Information Entry Portal showcasing the placement of sensors globally accessible there.
Picture Courtesy: OpenAQ.org

Open information democratizes entry. Initiatives like OpenAQ combination air high quality information from over 100+ international locations, making tens of millions of information factors freely accessible via APIs[9]. A number of satellite tv for pc datasets, comparable to from NASA (e.g., MODIS, VIIRS), ESA’s Sentinel missions, and India’s NCAP portal, additionally present open or semi-open entry to observing aerosol and particulate matter. Information repositories like Google Earth Engine and Mozilla’s Environmental Information Commons allow large-scale petabyte-scale geospatial information analyses with out requiring licensing prices for non-commercial use. Moreover, open information portals (with open APIs) comparable to OPenDAP[10] and STAC[11] don’t want third-party licenses and locking preparations like within the case of Google Earth Engine. With the satellite tv for pc and ground-level datasets which can be open and accessible, the primary barrier is the standardisation of those datasets and information factors. Clearer metadata, time decision, and models are wanted to make sure platform interoperability. Even then, initiatives like OpenAQ wouldn’t be doable with out the assist of nations keen to make it public.

2. Open Supply: Instruments that Scale Throughout Contexts

Open supply gives another and a chance to construct air high quality forecasting instruments, visualisation platforms, and even primary analytics pipelines, that are often tough for smaller establishments or native governments to afford.

UNICEF Laos PDR and Frontier Information Lab have made important strides in estimating air high quality utilizing an open-source machine studying mannequin[12] within the East Asia Pacific Area of Lao PDR. This work is the preliminary step in direction of making a scalable, international answer for air high quality estimation, aligning with the World Digital Compact and the UN’s dedication to leveraging know-how and AI to advance the Sustainable Improvement Objectives.

AQAI, for example, contributes to the open-source ecosystem by creating a modular information loader pipeline that integrates satellite tv for pc and floor sensors into AI fashions. UNICEF’s Workplace of Innovation has supported this initiative at AQAI.

A worldwide repository of air high quality fashions, tailored to numerous geographies, is essential for enhancing environmental monitoring. This shared useful resource, explicitly meant for local weather and air pollution fashions, may be hosted in a platform like Hugging Face, which may make it extra accessible to a bigger neighborhood and considerably decrease obstacles for international locations missing in-house AI experience or infrastructure. Such a repository would empower native researchers, public well being officers, and environmental businesses by providing entry to pre-trained fashions, documentation, and standardized instruments. This mechanism would allow them to deploy superior AI options with out in depth computational sources or extremely specialised technical groups. This democratisation of AI would speed up data-driven decision-making in low-resource settings, foster international collaboration, and guarantee all international locations, no matter their sources, can profit from the most recent developments in environmental monitoring, public well being, and sustainable growth.

3. Open Strategies: Constructing Belief By way of Transparency

Reproducibility is a core a part of scientific progress. Air high quality analysis is important as a result of the outcomes usually affect public well being and metropolis planning. That’s the reason open strategies matter—sharing the code, information, assumptions, and steps behind a examine helps others examine the outcomes and construct on the work. Open strategies are much more essential when utilizing AI or machine studying, which may be laborious to grasp if the method just isn’t totally defined. Some teams already do that properly. For instance, GEOS-Chem^[13] is a globally recognised three-dimensional atmospheric chemistry mannequin that makes use of meteorological information from NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS), managed by the World Modelling and Assimilation Workplace. Extensively utilized by a whole bunch of analysis teams worldwide, the mannequin helps a broad spectrum of research on atmospheric composition. Its design contains regional refinement and parallel computing capabilities, permitting for environment friendly, high-resolution simulations.

As a community-driven, open-access mannequin, GEOS-Chem is maintained collectively by its customers, who’re inspired to interact with its growth and cling to obligations outlined on the brand new consumer welcome web page. Potential customers are invited to seek the advice of the mannequin’s complete documentation and assist sources earlier than getting began.

Regardless of current advances, many AI-based fashions proceed functioning as “black containers,” with few research brazenly sharing key particulars comparable to hyperparameters, coaching code, or information preprocessing steps. Journals and funding businesses may be essential in enhancing transparency by imposing stronger necessities for open and reproducible strategies.

Open Approaches Allow Sooner, Extra Equitable Responses

Openness isn’t just about rules; it’s about sensible outcomes.

Fast Disaster Response: When wildfires swept throughout the state of California in the US[14] and throughout Australia[15], the open satellite tv for pc information enabled real-time air high quality maps to be disseminated extensively, which warned tens of millions of residents. In LMICs, the place air sensors are sparse, open distant sensing data-based fashions usually present the one viable answer for alerts[16].

Group Empowerment: Citizen science initiatives from Delhi to Ulaanbaatar[17] are more and more adopting open-source instruments to create their air high quality maps. Organisations like Air Gradient and OpenAQ run neighborhood packages, just like the Clear Air Advocates and the Group Ambassadors Program, to extend collective motion by the neighborhood. By way of Air Gradient’s program, people are educated with sensible approaches to enhance air high quality and scale back emissions. OpenAQ‘s program additionally trains air high quality advocates to make the most of air high quality monitoring information to assist the neighborhood in preventing air air pollution.

Well being Analysis at Scale: Epidemiologists finding out the long-term well being impacts of air air pollution can leverage a rising ecosystem of open-source instruments and freely accessible datasets.

Challenges and the Highway Forward

Whereas openness has delivered important good points, a couple of challenges stay:

Information High quality and Completeness: Open doesn’t all the time imply dependable. Standardising calibration protocols and creating validation frameworks for low-cost sensors continues to be a piece in progress. Furthermore, convincing authorities information homeowners to go for open-sourcing their information just isn’t but streamlined. Many international locations nonetheless don’t make it public.
Licensing Ambiguities: Many “open” datasets have imprecise or restrictive licenses that deter reuse. Harmonising licensing (e.g., adopting Inventive Commons or Open Information Commons requirements) would allow collaboration.
Sustainability of Open Initiatives: Many open-source initiatives depend on short-term grants or volunteer labour. Lengthy-term funding mechanisms and public-private partnerships are wanted to maintain this ecosystem.

Present Work and Promising Initiatives

Many promising efforts are addressing these gaps:

🌍 The Clear Air Fund and OpenAQ^{^[18]} are working collectively to construct country-level open air high quality ecosystems, particularly in Africa and Asia.
🤝 UNICEF Workplace of innovation, Enterprise Fund helps startups like AQAI^[19], and UNICEF groups comparable to Frontier Information Lab, UNICEF Lao PDR Nation Workplaces, that are constructing open-source GeoAI instruments for air air pollution estimation utilizing distant sensing and AI.
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Open Environmental Information Coalitions like Open Climate ^[20] are bringing collectively stakeholders to co-create requirements and repositories.

Name For Motion: Openness as a Public Good

Thrilling work is being developed with UNICEF East Asia Pacific’s Frontier Information Lab and the Lao PDR Nation Workplace. A shoutout to tutorial companions just like the Nationwide College of Laos as we co-develop the subsequent stage.

Air for Tomorrow: We should realise air air pollution is a world disaster, however its options should be native, inclusive, and adaptive. Embracing open information, open supply, and open strategies accelerates innovation and ensures nobody is left behind within the combat for clear air.

If the way forward for environmental well being is to be simply, resilient, and data-driven, it should even be radically open.

“All of us breathe.”

Keep tuned for our upcoming articles on the air high quality digital panorama, the place we discover the state-of-the-art in Open-Supply Air High quality Monitoring.

Discover out extra about our work here.

Acknowledgement: This work is supported by the partnership between ARM and UNICEF Workplace of Innovation to develop impactful AI options that deal with challenges affecting the lives of kids and their communities.

Contributors: Prithviraj Pramanik, AQAI; Hugo Ruiz Verastegui, Anthony Mockler, Judith Hanan, Frontier Information Lab, Risdianto Irawan, UNICEF EAPRO; Soheib Abdalla, Andrew Dunbrack, UNICEF Lao PDR Nation Workplace; Halim Jun, Daniel Alvarez, Shane O’Connor, UNICEF Workplace of Innovation;

^[1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1, Accessed: twenty first July 2025

[2] https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/099032625132535486, Final Accessed: 18^th August 2025

[3] https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/air-pollution-documents/air-quality-and-health/aap_bod_results_may2018_final.pdf, Final Accessed: 18^th August 2025

[4] https://www.unicef.org/eap/protecting-children-air-pollution-open-source-air-quality-machine-learning-se-asia, Final Accessed: 18^th August 2025

[5] https://www.unicef.org/laos/stories/real-time-air-monitoring-launches-schools, Final Accessed: 21^st August 2025

[6] https://www.unicef.org/innovation/, Final Accessed: 21^st August 2025

[7] https://www.aqai.xyz/, Final Accessed: 21^st August 2025

[8] https://www.unicef.org/what-we-do#:~:text=Across%20more%20than%20190%20countries,sanitation%20to%20those%20in%20need., Final Accessed: 21^st August 2025

[9] https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/api/what-are-application-programming-interfaces, Final Accessed: 21^st August 2025

[10] https://www.opendap.org/, Final Accessed: 21^st August 2025

[11] https://stacspec.org/en, Final Accessed: 21^st August 2025

[12] https://www.unicef.org/eap/protecting-children-air-pollution-open-source-air-quality-machine-learning-se-asia, Final Accessed: 21^st August 2025