Community Action
for Cleaner Air
One in eight EU citizens are living in urban areas where air pollutant levels exceed EU air quality standards (European Environment Agency). The impact of poor air quality is far reaching on the environment and has disastrous impacts on animals, human health, and economic growth.
The difficulty in tackling poor air quality is that it is different everywhere. Road transport, households, and industry cause the most pollutants, which of course change and travel once airborne. As a result blanket policies and actions do not have the same effect everywhere. Even past policies intended to protect the environment have had negative consequences on air quality. Diesel cars for example, once promoted as environmentally friendly, turned out to be high polluters.
COMPAIR realises that more nuanced local actions and measures are needed to tackle the issue of poor air quality and climate change. If poor air quality is caused by human activity, then human behaviours must be changed. Yet while our behaviours often reflect our environmental beliefs, the connection is not always so direct. Behaviours depend on many other personal factors besides environmental beliefs, including ability, self-efficacy, financial resources, habit, and choice. Being told what to do is not enough.
COMPAIR approaches behaviour change from a capacity building standpoint, giving people the digital tools to model, understand and analyse their existing behaviours and empower them to choose their own path forwards, making changes they know will benefit them, their family, neighbours, and friends.
Lets Create and Collaborate for Change
Simple Sensors
We help communities set up simple air quality experiments using data sensors to capture air quality and other related information (e.g. traffic counting) to better understand air status at a local level
Personalized Content
Online air quality maps and dashboards using easy-to-understand graphics help show relationships between air quality and other local factors e.g. traffic, for individual and group analysis.
Community Support
Using the online maps and dashboards individuals and communities can work out what needs to be done at a personal, local and city-wide level to improve air quality for all.
Citizen Science Labs
Our Citizen Science (CS) Labs are at the heart of our initiative. They are a online resource with some face-to-face meetings and workshops for bringing together all citizen science volunteers. Each CS Lab is headed by a professional Researcher who provides support for the science activities.
CS Lab activities consist of a series of workshops which will take the citizen, business and city administration participants through the co-creation process of local environmental problem definition, experiment design, data collection, analysis, solutioning and change.
This approach challenges us all in a human-centric way, enabling issues to be explored through brainstorming, hands-on prototyping, and testing. Join a CS Lab in the menu above for more information.