Affordable Air Quality Monitoring for Improved Air Quality Management in West Africa

Poor air quality damages the lives and livelihoods of millions of people and is predicted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to become the world's largest cause of preventable death by 2030. Those living in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) and cities are particularly affected, both through short-term acute effects and an accumulated life-long reduction in quality of life and health. There is a major opportunity to co-design and co-produce a highly fault-tolerant system for air pollution measurement, that is fully open-source, and built from easily available low cost and off-the-shelf components. The ambition is that this approach would be scale-able and could be sustained in LMICs by in-country practitioners at modest cost, long-term. New measurements can then be coupled to integrated assessment models developed by in-country agencies with our support to enhance their decision-making capacity on air pollution mitigation. This modelling will use a tool developed by project partners in the University. This new innovation for monitoring and modelling, can catalyse action and support long-term beneficial change, initially in our early adopter partner countries, and then applied to other LMICs.

Recent research from the University of York's Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratories (WACL) has developed a low power, highly fault tolerant technology based on the clustering of multiple low-cost air pollution sensors to provide high quality measurements of target air pollutants. This approach exploits the simplicity, modest cost and high reliability of state-of-the-art sensors and electronics, but significantly improves the quality of data collected. The real-world use of sensor technologies has been slowed due to issues relating to poor individual sensor data quality. York have developed a technology that uses multiple sensors of the same type to solve the two key outstanding barriers to application in LMICs, that of sensor-to-sensor variability and unexpected sensor failure. The aim is to enable a self-supporting user community that can build and fix its own instruments and help improve on our initial designs. This approach differs fundamentally from the prevailing paradigm of a top-down commercial services model which has for many years failed to function in LMICs.

The Stockholm Environment Institute centre (SEI) in the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of York has been working with the Ministries of Environment in Togo and Cote d'Ivoire and the Ghana Environment Protection Agency, and the University of Lomé, Togo and Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Cote D'Ivoire to develop national models using LEAP-IBC (developed by SEI), to support national low-emission planning. We will build on this work applying LEAP-IBC to Lomé, Abidjan, Accra, and another Ghanaian city (e.g. Kumasi) where no such tool is available, and there is limited or no regular monitoring. This will allow them to develop emission inventories of key air pollutants, baseline and mitigation emission projections, and to estimate the resulting concentrations of PM2.5 and the associated human health impacts. We will work with local academics and planners to support the development of the analysis, guiding them through the data collection, model design, model validation and extraction of results. Working with the University of Colorado and WACL, we will further develop the GEOS-Chem Adjoint model inputs to LEAP-IBC that converts emissions in LEAP-IBC to concentrations of PM2.5 and ozone in these cities.

The inclusion of this modelling, developed by planners in Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire and Togo will also allow for an understanding of how the monitoring and modelling can be mutually beneficial to provide the evidence needed for the further development, implementation and monitoring of air quality plans in these cities and opportunities to achieve ambient air quality standards in cities.

The project will focus on provide the ability to monitor air pollution and assess mitigation strategies in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs). We will co-design monitoring equipment with academics and practitoners from three countries and apply modelling in three new cities of West Africa: Lomé, Abidjan, one further city in Ghana (e.g. Kumasi), and improve modelling in Accra. The work done in the project will address major gaps in the ability to manage air quality in these polluted cities where there is no regular monitoring and no ability to understand the contribution of different sources to the air pollution experienced.

With project partners in Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire and Togo we will co-design and co-produce the open-source resources needed locally manufacture and maintain a sustainable air quality instrument, designed around local skills, engineering capabilities and access to materials and parts. The new instruments, comprised of generic components accessible anywhere in the world, will be able to be fixed by following training guides, and no sub-components should cost more than $100 to replace. Electricity needs will be low. Our priority will be the simultaneous measurement of CO2, CO, NO, NO2, O3 and PM in a single instrument package. The proposed web-based platform will enable any LMIC to build and maintain these monitoring devices, and at an affordable cost. This has the potential to spread monitoring widely into areas that currently have no monitoring at all, yet are suffering from high levels of air pollution.
The capacity building and tool development using LEAP-IBC will enable users in the countries to develop models for cities that can be used to develop emission scenarios, and evaluate the effectiveness of different mitigation measures on air quality and human health. Quantitative assessments of health impacts can motivate interest to help solve air quality problems, and understanding the influence of different sources on air quality can help build effective mitigation strategies.

In the specific countries the project will help to feed in information to support air quality management and improve the following capacities:

Togo - there are currently no monitoring stations in Lomé. LEAP-IBC has been applied to the whole country, but there is no separate model for Lomé and this project will provide the first attempt. Togo has now published a national air quality plan, which states the need to develop monitoring in Lomé and the work in this project will help support this strategy.

Ghana - the Ghana EPA are experienced LEAP-IBC modellers. They have applied it at national scale and started to apply the model to Accra. They have national air quality guidelines for different gases and particles, but they have no monitoring or modelling cities, other than Accra. This project will allow them to check how well different cities are complying with the guidelines values set for different pollutants. Ghana EPA wish to link air pollution and climate change to the SDG processes being developed in the country, which can be supported by the modelling.

Cote d'Ivoire - The Ministry of Environment developed a LEAP-IBC model for the country with help from the University in Abidjan, but they have no model covering Abidjan and there are no permanent monitoring stations. This project will build capacity to fill these gaps. The University is engaged in many projects relating to air pollution and increasing the capacity to understand their air pollution has the potential to have a large impact in Cote d'Ivoire and the whole region.

The three countries are parties to the 2009 Abidjan Agreement on Better Air Quality, who agreed to take actions to improve air quality, which can be used to disseminate this work to other countries in the region. The project is well linked with ECOWAS - the Economic Community of West African States, which is interested in promoting monitoring and modelling in W Africa.