Reported by the Editorial Team
According to an article published by the World Economic Forum, air pollution is the greatest global environmental risk, causing 6.7 million premature deaths and an economic cost of 8.1 trillion dollars annually (6 per cent of global GDP).
Despite the severity of the problem, the authors point out that there is a significant information gap: in 2024, 36 per cent of countries lacked air quality monitoring systems, leaving billions of people in critical regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America without open government data.
Paradoxically, more environmental data is being generated today than ever before, thanks to the development of low-cost sensors. However, structural, commercial and political barriers persist. Many governments do not publish the data due to a lack of infrastructure or fears about the impact on tourism and investment, whilst some sensor companies restrict access to the information to their clients.
In light of this, the article points out that evidence shows transparency accelerates environmental improvement. Local projects in The Gambia, Uganda and Kenya demonstrate that public access to real-time data drives successful regulations and public policies. To standardise these practices, the World Economic Forum’s Global Council for the Future of Clean Air has developed five guiding principles:
- Implement representative and sustained monitoring.
- Ensure open systems and data sovereignty.
- Maintain the quality and integrity of information.
- Adopt standard protocols and harmonised formats.
- Translate open data into concrete climate action.
According to experts, applying these principles requires the commitment of funders (by requiring open data in their grants), governments (by publishing public data in real time), sensor manufacturers (by relinquishing ownership of the data) and civil society. “The technical tools already exist; success will depend on consolidating this shared framework of expectations so that the data revolution benefits those who need it most.”
