Defining Your Air Quality Project

This chapter is designed to assist you in shaping and concretizing your air quality project. Our aim is to ensure that your efforts are targeted, impactful, and directly address the air quality challenges prevalent in your community. By answering the guiding questions presented in this chapter, you will establish a robust foundation for a successful and impactful air quality monitoring project.

This chapter is structured around two fundamental objectives. Firstly, it wants to maximize the impact of the collected data by avoiding “aimless” data collection. Every data point you gather could contribute to a larger, well-defined purpose. By clearly articulating your goals, you can strategically deploy your monitors and analyze your data to realize tangible outcomes, be it enhancing public awareness, influencing policy, or fostering behavioral changes.

Secondly, this chapter seeks to optimize the toolkit for your specific air quality objective. While this toolkit is designed to be versatile, to exploit its full potential, it is essential to tailor its application to your unique circumstances.

1. Your Project Overview

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to fill in the overview table below, which summarizes the key characteristics of your project. This overview will serve as a valuable reference throughout your project and directly inform your decisions in subsequent chapters.
These include:

• Selecting the most appropriate monitor to meet your air quality project needs;
• Applying calibration strategies to help you ensure data accuracy;
• Analyzing and interpreting data to help you respond to your key questions;
• Engaging the community to assist you in targeting your outreach and data sharing effectively;
• Measuring impact, where you will develop metrics to evaluate the success of your project.

In the next sections, we’ll help you refine your project details through guiding questions, insights, and case examples.

1.1. Aim: What is the Impact That You Ideally Want to Achieve?

What specific changes do you hope to see as a direct result of your air quality monitoring project? Is your objective to primarily raise public awareness about air quality issues, promote positive behavioral changes such as reduced vehicle idling, gain a better understanding of local pollution sources, advocate for policy changes such as stricter emission controls, or hold polluters accountable for their emissions? Consider how you will measure the impact of your project to determine if you are achieving your desired outcomes.

Defining your desired impact is important because it provides clear direction and motivation for your project. It also ensures that you design your project in a way that effectively achieves these goals and allows for meaningful evaluation of its success. When setting your impact goals, be as specific and realistic as possible. For example, instead of a general goal like “raise awareness,” a more concrete goal might be “reduce the vehicle idling near schools by 20% within one year.”

Think about methods you can use to measure your impact. Will you conduct surveys to assess changes in public awareness or behavior? Will you track policy changes implemented by local authorities? Will you observe shifts in specific behaviors, such as reduced idling? Or will you monitor changes in pollution levels over time to assess the effectiveness of interventions? Consider also who you need to engage to achieve your desired impact. This might include community members, local authorities, businesses, or other relevant stakeholders.

Consider these examples: A project aiming to reduce vehicle idling might use real-time data displays in public locations such as schools and markets to visibly show pollution levels and encourage drivers to turn off their engines. The impact could be measured by observing and quantifying idling behavior both before and after the implementation of this intervention.

A project focused on industrial pollution might utilize collected data to identify peak pollution times and correlate them with data from the factory operations. This data could then be presented to local authorities to advocate for the implementation of stricter emission controls or improved enforcement of existing regulations. The impact could be measured by tracking policy changes or documented improvements in factory emission control practices.

1.2. Which Population Groups Are Affected by the Air Pollution You Want To Monitor?

Who are the individuals most susceptible to the air pollution you are concerned about? Is your focus on children, the elderly, individuals with pre-existing respiratory conditions, the general population, or perhaps specific occupational groups such as street vendors or traffic police? Identifying vulnerable populations is important as it helps prioritize monitoring locations and tailor your community engagement efforts.

For instance, a project focused on children’s health might prioritize monitoring air quality in the vicinity of schools, playgrounds, and school bus routes. The data collected could then be used to advocate for traffic calming measures or the creation of more green spaces around schools. A project targeting the elderly population might place monitors near senior centers, retirement homes, and areas frequently visited by older adults. Data from these locations could inform recommendations for improving air quality around these facilities or for issuing alerts during periods of high pollution. A project aimed at protecting street vendors might deploy monitors in market areas and busy commercial streets to assess their exposure levels. This data could be used to advocate for protective measures or explore relocation strategies to reduce their exposure.

You might also want to keep in mind newly developed areas in a city, e.g. new housing and industrial areas and other recent demographic changes when planning which population groups are most affected. Also, future developments could already be taken into consideration.

1.3. Audience: Who Should be Involved in Your Project?

Consider who needs to be involved to ensure the success and impact of your project. These stakeholders might include community members, local authorities, NGOs, researchers, or businesses. Identifying your stakeholders is vital for effective community engagement, targeted data sharing, and ensuring the long-term sustainability of your initiative. Involving the right people from the start fosters project ownership and maximizes its potential for positive change.

When defining your stakeholders, think about those most affected by the air pollution problem, often marginalized sections of the populations, and those who have the capacity to implement changes based on your findings. Consider also who could contribute resources, expertise, or networks to strengthen your project.

Chapter P3 (Community Engagement Planning) provides further advice on how to define your stakeholders.

1.4. Project Duration

The duration of your project will largely depend on its objectives. Short-term studies, such as identifying local emission sources, assessing a specific factory’s impact, or conducting an intervention study, can be completed in a few weeks or months. However, in general, the longer you monitor, the greater the long-term impact on your community.

Ideally, air quality monitoring should be a continuous effort, providing long-term data for deeper analysis, tracking pollution trends, assessing policy effectiveness, and informing air quality management strategies. However, maintaining long-term funding and dedicated resources can be challenging. To address this, consider integrating your air quality monitoring project into existing environmental programs, forming partnerships with universities, NGOs, or local governments, or seeking support from businesses through sponsorships and small-scale grants.

For a well-rounded understanding of air quality patterns, aim to monitor for at least one full seasonal cycle (12 months). Air pollution levels fluctuate due to weather changes, human activities, and seasonal environmental events. A year-long project ensures you capture these variations, leading to more representative data and a clearer picture of long-term trends.

Extending the project’s duration also strengthens community engagement. Ongoing monitoring sustains public awareness, encourages participation in air quality initiatives, and fosters long-term action toward cleaner air.

While long-term monitoring is the ideal scenario, even shorter projects—if well-planned—can provide valuable insights and drive meaningful change.

1.5. What Category of Air Pollution Do You Want to Monitor?

Are you primarily concerned with regional pollution that affects a broad geographical area, such as city-wide smog or general background levels, or are you more focused on localized pollution hotspots, such as those found at busy traffic intersections, industrial zones, or near waste burning sites? The answer to this question is important because it will significantly influence your site selection strategy. Monitoring regional pollution necessitates a different sensor distribution approach compared to targeting highly localized hotspots.

To guide your thinking, consider the characteristics of your community. Is air pollution generally widespread across the area, or are there specific locations that appear to be disproportionately affected? Also, consider local knowledge. Do community members already have suspicions or insights regarding potential pollution sources or areas of concern? Reviewing any existing air quality reports or studies for your area, if available, can also provide valuable context.

For example, a city experiencing frequent smog events might choose to deploy monitors across various neighborhoods to understand the overall pollution levels and identify any variations across the city. They might strategically place monitors in parks, residential areas, and commercial zones to obtain a representative overview. In contrast, a community concerned about traffic-related pollution near a school might concentrate their monitoring efforts around busy intersections and roads adjacent to the school. They could place monitors at varying distances from the roadside to understand the pollution gradient. Alternatively, a community residing near a factory might want to monitor air quality in areas downwind of the factory to assess the impact of its emissions on nearby residential areas. In this case, strategic monitor placement would consider prevailing wind directions.

1.6. Site selection

Identifying the deployment locations of your monitoring network is an essential aspect of your project planning. Beyond strategic considerations, such as proximity to your target population and the distinction between local and regional pollution, there are also practical aspects (e.g. power availability, security concerns, permissions from site owners). This topic is comprehensively discussed in Chapter P4: Site & Monitor Selection Planning. Please refer to this chapter to plan this aspect of your project.

1.7. How Accurate/Reliable Does Your Air Quality Data Need to Be?

What level of data accuracy and reliability is necessary to effectively achieve your project’s goals? Do you require scientifically rigorous data suitable for formal reporting to environmental agencies or for informing policy decisions? Or is indicative data, which provides general trends and relative pollution levels, sufficient for your purposes of identifying pollution sources, raising awareness and prompting community action? Are you primarily interested in obtaining precise absolute values for pollution concentrations, or is it more important for your project to track relative changes in pollution levels over time?

The answer to this question is important as it will influence your choices regarding monitor selection, the stringency of calibration procedures you need to implement, and the level of data quality control measures required throughout your project. It is important to note that higher levels of data accuracy typically come with increased complexity and potentially higher costs.

When considering your accuracy needs, think about the intended use of your data. For projects focused on raising community awareness and encouraging community-level action, indicative data showing relative changes and general trends may be entirely sufficient. In such cases, calibration efforts can be simpler, focusing primarily on ensuring consistency and comparability between sensors within your network.

However, for projects aiming to directly influence policy decisions or in situations where data might be used in a legal or regulatory context, a higher level of accuracy and data traceability is crucial. In these scenarios, it is important to thoroughly document your data collection and calibration methods to ensure data credibility with policymakers and regulatory bodies. You might consider using dual sensor modules which use two different sensors to measure the same air quality parameter. This redundancy enhances accuracy and increased reliability. If your project includes a research component, even at a basic level, such as exploring pollution patterns and trends in your community, a moderate level of data accuracy is generally needed. Calibration procedures should be more systematic, and you should implement robust data quality control procedures to ensure the integrity of your findings.

1.8. What Resources Are Available for Your Project?

What financial resources, human resources (including volunteers and technical expertise), time, and existing infrastructure are available to support your air quality monitoring project? Understanding the resources at your disposal is important because resource availability will significantly shape the scope and scale of your project. Being realistic about your resource limitations from the outset will help ensure that your project is sustainable and realistically achievable within your constraints.

To assess your available resources, start by making a realistic evaluation of your project budget. Consider all potential costs, including the purchase of monitors, installation & safety measures (see Chapter S1 - Deployment Preparation), maintenance requirements, and the costs associated with planned community engagement activities.

Next, evaluate the human resources available to you. Have you appointed a central coordinator with a fixed team to set up and operate the sensors? Or do you depend on volunteers who can contribute time and effort? Consider the time commitment required for each stage of the project, from initial planning and setup to ongoing operation, data analysis, and community engagement. Chapter P3 (Community Engagement Planning) provides further advice on how you can engage your community to practically support your project.

For instance, a volunteer-driven community project, relying primarily on volunteer effort, may need to prioritize simplicity in setup and maintenance procedures to be managed by volunteers. Data analysis and community engagement strategies should also be designed to be effectively carried out by volunteers with potentially varying levels of technical expertise. A project with a limited budget will need to make strategic choices to maximize impact within financial constraints. One key advantage of this toolkit are the available low-cost monitors integrated with an easy-to-use analytics and calibration tools data platform.

Conversely, a project that benefits from university support might have access to a broader range of resources, including technical expertise from researchers and students, direct access to reference instruments, and potentially some level of dedicated funding. This greater resource availability allows for a more ambitious project scope, the potential for higher data accuracy through more sophisticated calibration and quality control, and more in-depth data analysis capabilities.

1.9. Next Steps

By investing the time and effort to thoughtfully answer these guiding questions and create your project overview, you have significantly increased the potential for your air quality monitoring project to make a real and positive difference in your community. The insights you have gained in this chapter will be needed in subsequent chapters of this toolkit.

Developed by AirGradient in Collaboration with the UNDP Global Centre Singapore CC-BY-SA