#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.

🇰🇿 Kazakhstan · Almaty Air Initiative

Almaty Air Initiative, a private foundation set up in 2024, secret-shops vehicle inspections and tests fuel at the city's biggest petrol stations to show where the smog comes from.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Unión de Afectados y Afectadas por las Operaciones Petroleras de Texaco (UDAPT)

Nine girls from Ecuador's oil country won a 2021 court order to shut down the open gas flares burning beside their homes, and five years on they are still fighting to make the state obey.

🇷🇼 Rwanda · Ampersand

A motorcycle taxi driver cannot wait two hours for a battery to charge — so Ampersand built a network where you swap it in three minutes instead.

🇨🇿 Czechia · Arnika

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

🇵🇾 Paraguay · Proyecto Respira

After weeks of wildfire smoke blanketed Paraguay in 2024, an engineer and a women-led coding community launched the country's first AI air-quality forecast for Asunción, open source and free on Telegram.

🇸🇴 Somalia · BECO

Somalia has some of the most expensive electricity on earth, all of it from diesel — until a Mogadishu utility started building solar instead.

🇰🇪 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.

🇳🇱 Netherlands · BYCS

An unpaid, unofficial bicycle mayor in 141 cities, each one a citizen with no power except the ability to embarrass the real mayor.

🇨🇴 Colombia · CanAirIO

A cyclist-engineer and an activist in Bogotá turned a few hours of soldering into a citizen network whose homemade sensors found bus cabins with air up to ten times worse than elsewhere in the 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.

🌍 Global · Institute for Transportation and Development Policy

A metro costs a decade and a fortune; a well-designed busway can open in two years, and ITDP has helped 120 cities work out which one they need.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Ciclocidade

São Paulo's cyclists count themselves — at ten points across the city — because nobody else was counting.

🇵🇰 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.

🇳🇵 Nepal · Cycle City Network Nepal

Cyclists who met monthly at Basantapur Durbar Square kept pushing until Lalitpur painted the valley's first bike lane — and the counts went up.

🇷🇸 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.

🇳🇱 Netherlands · Energiesprong

A prefabricated facade is craned onto an old Dutch housing block, and by the end of the week the flats inside need almost no heating at all.

🇳🇬 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.

🇧🇪 Belgium · Filter Café Filtré Atelier

Instead of going for their usual Friday coffee, a group of Brussels parents closed the road outside their children's school — and then kept doing it.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Work for a Better Bangladesh Trust

In a city where most journeys are made on foot, WBB Trust went out and measured how much of Dhaka simply has no pavement.

🇦🇹 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.

🇷🇼 Rwanda · City of Kigali

Twice a month Kigali shuts its main roads to cars and fills them with runners, cyclists and free blood-pressure checks.

🇨🇩 DR Congo · WASARU (Water and Sanitation in Rural and Urban Areas)

In a megacity of more than 17 million people with almost no public air data, a Congolese sanitation NGO is installing the country's only open real-time PM2.5 network and taking the readings into classrooms.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Koalisi Pejalan Kaki

A crash that killed eight people on a Jakarta pavement turned a handful of angry pedestrians into a national coalition.

🇱🇾 Libya · Infinity Power

Africa's largest oil reserves sit under Libya, and its first solar plant was built in a Saharan oasis 1,000km from the coast.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Liga Peatonal

Mexican pedestrian collectives wrote themselves a charter of rights, then held a national congress every year to make cities honour it.

🇮🇳 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.

🇲🇼 Malawi · Malawi Initiative for Clean Air Solutions (MIfCAS)

A Ghanaian-led citizen-science team has put 24 low-cost monitors in 11 Malawian districts and now the weekly government air bulletin runs on their data.

🇲🇾 Malaysia · CERAH Anti-Haze Action

When Malaysia dropped its proposed transboundary haze law, an anti-haze coalition filed a human-rights complaint that ended up as a national commission report titled Silent Enemy.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia · Menged Le Sew

Addis Ababa closes 29 road corridors to cars one Sunday a month, and the crowd that fills them has grown every year since 2019.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Mobility Awards

Filipino cyclists ranked their own cities and malls on how bike-friendly they actually were, and the mayors started competing for the rating.

🇱🇷 Liberia · Clean Air Liberia (United Methodist University)

A Liberian university team earned global recognition as one of just seven projects worldwide to change national air policy in 2025, with a PM2.5 network where none existed.

🇲🇿 Mozambique · Manhiça Health Research Centre (CISM)

Mozambique's BLAZE project bolts low-cost PM2.5 sensors onto hospitals and health centres in Maputo, Matola and Boane so doctors can finally see the air their patients breathe.

🌍 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.'

🇫🇷 France · Association Respire

French clean-air association Respire helped push Paris to 279 car-free or calmed streets outside schools, and in 2026 celebrated forcing Suez to drop an incinerator project at Istres.

🇵🇱 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.

🇹🇭 Thailand · Trees for Dharma

On Asalha Bucha 2025 worshippers at more than 90 temples walked the sacred circuit holding young trees rather than smoky candles and incense, then took them home to plant.

🇮🇳 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.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Mums for Lungs

A group of South London mothers pushing prams through Brixton smog now has primary-school children painting clean-air banners that hang on Lambeth and Southwark lampposts.

🇪🇸 Spain · Ecologistas en Accion

Every year this confederation of Spanish local ecologist groups publishes the country's independent air-quality tally, and 2025's showed 33 million people breathing air above the EU's 2030 limits.

🇱🇰 Sri Lanka · Federation for Environment, Climate and Technology (FECT)

A Sri Lankan non-profit think tank runs cleanair.lk, a trilingual portal that publishes a fresh air-quality ranking of the country's towns every single week from low-cost sensors.

🇵🇭 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.

🇩🇪 Germany · Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH)

A nature-and-consumer group founded in 1975 has sued dozens of German cities into enforcing nitrogen-dioxide limits, and its clean-air case has now been referred to the European Court of Justice.

🇮🇹 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.

🇹🇰 Tokelau · Government of Tokelau

Three atolls, 1,500 people, no grid to connect to — so Tokelau became the first place on earth to run entirely on the sun.

🇬🇭 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.

🇹🇷 Türkiye · Temiz Hava Hakki Platformu

A coalition of health and nature groups won a Council of State ruling in September 2026 halting a rule that could have exempted coal plants, steel mills and cement works from pollution standards.

🇮🇳 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.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe · Kgotso Development Trust

With no public government PM2.5 data in Zimbabwe, a community trust founded in 2013 has been quietly planting low-cost sensors from Harare to Beitbridge and is now funded to build the country's first real-time network.

🇿🇦 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.