Air Quality Toolkit for Development Finance Institutions

By Malcolm Bricknell (Loughborough University).

The Clean Air Fund has arranged a toolkit that provides practical guidance in understanding air pollution, integrating air quality improvements into development projects across different sectors, and tracking air quality outcomes. It was developed by Ricardo Group and Clean Air Asia, with financial support from Clean Air Fund.

As Clean Air Fund points out, working on air quality issues can help drive development, improve health, deliver economic benefits, and achieve climate change mitigation and adaptation. Transitioning to Modern Energy Cooking projects can play an important role in improving air quality in terms of both reducing household air pollution and through its impact on ambient air pollution. The toolkit can be a valuable resource in promoting this agenda.

The toolkit is primarily aimed to support the work of large Development Finance Institutions and has been endorsed by a range of leading institutions. It is aimed at project officers and managers working across different sectors with little or no knowledge of air quality. Consequently, it offers a valuable resource for non-specialists to gain a better understanding of a wide range of issues associated with air quality and provides a wealth of information and references to different publications. It is also therefore an excellent publication for people involved in promoting clean cooking to gain a better understanding of issues related to air quality.

Clean Air Fund research has shown that between 2015 and 2021 only 2% of international public climate finance ($11.6 billion) went towards tackling air pollution. As the largest funders of outdoor air quality projects, MDBs and bilateral donors play critical roles in substantially increasing the availability of development finance for air quality.

The toolkit comprises two parts:

• Part 1: Information on air pollution – sets out critical information on air quality, explaining why it is important, how it can be better understood and what actions can be taken to improve it. Part 1 is designed to act as a signpost for relevant resources on air quality and includes various links to supporting information and examples of good practice from around the world. This information is designed to provide the “why?” for the inclusion of air quality into projects.
  
• Part 2: Clean air guide for project officers – a practical guide on how air quality can be better integrated into project development, discussing each stage of the project development lifecycle, with the aim of maximising air quality benefits at each step and improving the tracking and reporting of air quality impacts. Two appendices are also included, providing a repository of actions known to be effective in tackling air pollution, and a comprehensive list of air quality indicators.