#air-quality

🇬🇪 Georgia · Green Pole

Volunteers in Tbilisi are hand-building low-cost sensors to fill the gaps in Georgia's threadbare state air-monitoring network, one rooftop at a time.

🇺🇬 Uganda · AirQo

A Makerere University-born network of low-cost sensors giving African cities real-time, street-level air pollution data.

🇨🇿 Czechia · Arnika

A Prague-based watchdog whose lab testing of toxic chemicals in everyday products has driven Czech and EU-wide policy change.

🇰🇪 Kenya · BURN Manufacturing

A Nairobi factory mass-manufacturing fuel-efficient Jikokoa cookstoves that cut indoor smoke and charcoal use in African kitchens.

🇳🇵 Nepal · MinErgy

Making the fire travel a zigzag path instead of a straight line through a brick kiln burns the coal more completely — and takes a startling bite out of the smoke over Kathmandu.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Bicitekas A.C.

Since 1998, this cyclist collective has been trading car exhaust for pedal power on the streets of Mexico City.

🇬🇭 Ghana · C40 Cities

Accra is wiring itself with low-cost sensors to see, for the first time, exactly where its toxic air is hitting hardest.

🇲🇳 Mongolia · Breathe Mongolia - Clean Air Coalition

Breathe Mongolia is a volunteer-founded coalition using air quality data and advocacy to fight Ulaanbaatar's severe coal-smoke pollution.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · Pakistan Air Quality Initiative (PAQI)

A citizen-scientist network put Pakistan's invisible smog on the map, one low-cost monitor at a time.

🇮🇹 Italy · Cittadini per l'Aria

A Milan-founded network turns ordinary residents into air-quality researchers, then takes City Hall to court over the pollution the data reveals.

🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan · MoveGreen

A youth-founded Kyrgyz NGO turned Bishkek's invisible smog into real-time public data, then built a region-wide coalition to act on it.

🇹🇭 Thailand · Thailand Clean Air Network (Thailand CAN)

A citizen network of scientists and activists drafted Thailand's own Clean Air Act, and in 2025 got it through parliament's lower house without a single vote against.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Clean Air Asia

A Manila-based network founded in 2001 turns air-quality science into action plans for hundreds of choking Asian cities, from Metro Manila to New Delhi.

🌍 Global · Clean Air Fund

A London-based philanthropic fund channels grants to grassroots and government air-quality projects across India, Africa, Europe and the Americas.

🇭🇰 Hong Kong · Clean Air Network

Hong Kong's only dedicated air-pollution NGO has spent over 15 years turning smog data into policy wins that let the city breathe easier.

🇧🇬 Bulgaria · Za Zemiata (Environmental Association / Friends of the Earth Bulgaria)

Za Zemiata's research and advocacy helped drive Sofia's low-emission zone, slashing the number of high-polluting cars entering the city center within months of enforcement.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · ClientEarth

Environmental lawyers who take governments and corporations to court — and have helped stop or shut down coal plants across Europe.

🇷🇸 Serbia · Eko straža (Eco Guard)

A volunteer-run citizen movement born on Facebook in 2019 has become one of the Balkans' loudest voices against Serbia's toxic air.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · Health of Mother Earth Foundation

Some Niger Delta villages have not known a fully dark night in sixty years, because the gas flare at the end of the road never goes out.

🇭🇺 Hungary · Levegő Munkacsoport (Clean Air Action Group)

A federation of 60-plus Hungarian NGOs has spent decades pushing for cleaner air through green taxes, sustainable transport and hard data.

🇦🇹 Austria · GLOBAL 2000 (Friends of the Earth Austria)

Since six activists founded it in 1982, GLOBAL 2000 has turned public petitions into Austrian law, from a landmark 1997 anti-GMO referendum to the country's 2011 climate protection act.

🇮🇳 India · Care for Air

A volunteer-driven Delhi non-profit that turned parental worry over toxic winters into a Supreme Court petition and a citywide clean-air education movement.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Bicara Udara (Yayasan Udara Anak Bangsa)

Three worried mothers turned a change.org petition against Jakarta's smog into a nationwide youth movement for the right to clean air.

🇮🇳 India · Kheti Virasat Mission

A former journalist's grassroots mission is replacing Punjab's smoke-choked stubble fires with mulching, composting, and organic farming.

🇮🇳 India · Mahila Housing SEWA Trust

An Ahmedabad-founded women's NGO training female construction workers in Delhi to monitor air quality and demand clean-air action.

🌍 Global · OpenAQ

A Washington DC-based nonprofit that aggregates the world's open air quality data into one free, public platform to fight 'air inequality.'

🇵🇱 Poland · Polski Alarm Smogowy (Polish Smog Alert)

What began as a Kraków social-media campaign against coal smog has grown into a nationwide coalition of over 50 Polish grassroots groups.

🇺🇦 Ukraine · Ecoaction (Center for Environmental Initiatives)

Ukraine's largest environmental NGO is steering coal-mining regions toward a fossil-free 'just transition' and pushing green standards into the country's war reconstruction, even as Russian attacks continue.

🇮🇳 India · SayTrees Environmental Trust

SayTrees packs dense Miyawaki mini-forests into Bengaluru's leftover urban land to cut heat and clean the air, one former parking lot or roadside strip at a time.

🇵🇭 Philippines · EcoWaste Coalition

Grown out of the campaign that won the Philippines' Clean Air Act, this coalition now battles the backyard trash fires that keep filling Filipino neighborhoods with toxic smoke.

🇹🇼 Taiwan · Citizens of the Earth, Taiwan

A Kaohsiung-founded foundation that has spent two decades taking on the coal plants, crackers and illegal factories fouling Taiwan's air.

🇵🇪 Peru · Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense

For decades the smelter at La Oroya put so much lead, arsenic and sulphur dioxide into the air that children's blood tested above safe limits almost universally — and in 2024 an international court finally said the state was responsible.

🇨🇳 China · Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE)

A Beijing NGO turned government smokestack data into a public app that lets millions of citizens see who's polluting their air.

🇳🇵 Nepal · The Cookstove Project

A small US nonprofit building smokeless brick-and-steel cookstoves with rural Nepali families to replace smoky open fires.

🇮🇹 Italy · Genitori Tarantini

In the Tamburi district of Taranto, families were told to keep children indoors on windy days, because the wind carries iron dust off the slag heaps of the steelworks next door.

🇨🇱 Chile · Mujeres de Zonas de Sacrificio en Resistencia Quintero-Puchuncaví

Chile zoned this bay for the industry nobody wanted anywhere else, then acted surprised when schoolchildren started collapsing — so the mothers took the phrase 'sacrifice zone' and made it the state's problem.

🌍 Global · Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives

An incinerator is usually sold to a city as the modern answer to its rubbish, and it is almost always built next to the poorest neighbourhood — which is why the network fighting them is made of waste pickers.

🇬🇭 Ghana · Toyola Energy Limited

A Ghanaian social enterprise sells ceramic-lined charcoal stoves that cut smoke, fuel bills, and burns for low-income households across West Africa.

🌍 Global · Clean Air Institute

A Washington-based nonprofit helps Latin American governments design clean-air policy and tracks the region's most polluted cities.

🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina · Eko akcija

Eko akcija runs Bosnia and Herzegovina's citizen air-quality monitoring network and pushes Sarajevo's government to tackle the wood-and-coal smog that chokes the city each winter.

🇺🇸 United States · TreePeople

TreePeople plants and distributes shade trees across Los Angeles' hottest, least-canopied neighborhoods to fight extreme heat and clean the city's air.

🇮🇳 India · Chakr Innovation

A Delhi cleantech startup built a device that clamps onto diesel generator exhausts and turns the captured soot into usable ink and paint.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · Urban Forest (Shahzad Qureshi)

After Karachi's deadly 2015 heatwave, one engineer began planting dense Miyawaki forests to cool Pakistan's biggest city.

🇺🇸 United States · WE ACT for Environmental Justice

Founded by Harlem residents in 1988, WE ACT puts air-quality sensors and policy power directly into the hands of the Black and Brown New Yorkers who breathe the city's worst air.

🇮🇳 India · Warrior Moms

Five worried Delhi mothers turned lockdown blue skies into a pan-India movement demanding clean air for every child.

🇺🇸 United States · West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project

Residents choking on port-truck diesel exhaust turned themselves into scientists, building the community air-monitoring model that reshaped California clean-air law.

🇿🇦 South Africa · groundWork Friends of the Earth South Africa

groundWork's #DeadlyAir lawsuit forced South Africa's courts to declare toxic Mpumalanga Highveld air a violation of the constitutional right to a healthy environment.