Join Us

If you share our commitment to clean air and would like to hear news from Breathe Cities, sign up to our email updates.
You can opt out at any time. To read our full Privacy Policy, please click here.

12 May 2026

Knowledge Global

Strength in Numbers: How Cities Are Innovating Through Data to Unlock Ambitious Clean Air Action

Cities around the world are taking ambitious steps to clean the air we breathe, with data playing a central role in accelerating action. "Strength in Numbers" highlights how cities across the Breathe Cities initiative are innovating through data, from low-cost sensors and health impact modelling to citizen science and community engagement, to strengthen decision-making and accelerate healthier, more sustainable urban futures.

Download the Full English Report

Download the English Executive Summary

Download the English City Toolkit

Around the globe, cities are taking ambitious steps to clean the air we breathe. Across diverse city contexts, data is central to this effort.

Data enables cities to strengthen evidence-based decision making and build sustained public support for ambitious clean air interventions. While measuring, managing, analysing, and communicating air quality data can be complex, cities worldwide are increasingly showing that by taking innovative approaches, they can accelerate action.

This report highlights how cities are adopting data-informed approaches to strengthen air quality management and improve air quality. Through case studies from Bogota to Jakarta, Accra to London, it illustrates how city governments are measuring, using, and communicating data in innovative ways to drive clean air action.

Highlights

Cities are showing that innovative approaches to measuring, analysing and communicating air quality data can accelerate ambitious clean air action across different geographies, capacities and starting points.

Data is most powerful when it reflects how pollution affects daily life, helping cities identify who is most exposed, prioritise interventions and build public support for clean air policies.

Community-led monitoring, open-access platforms and citizen science initiatives are helping position air quality data as a shared civic resource that empowers communities and supports locally grounded action.

How cities are innovating through data

Some of the key lessons from the report to better enable cities to use data to accelerate clean air progress include:

Enhance data through innovative monitoring technologies.

New technologies, such as low-cost air quality sensors, are providing effective and affordable ways for cities to collect air quality data and use this to inform policies. Cities can build data collection capabilities over time, progressively strengthening and expanding monitoring networks and complementing them with other sources of data, leveraging external partnerships, satellite or remote sensing data, community-generated data, and lived experience insights to inform policy and programs and inspire action.

Invest in systems and people, not monitoring alone.

Data has greater impact when integrated across sectors and institutionalised in government processes. Systems that enable effective data-sharing mechanisms and continuous in-house capacity building ensure information is used consistently and effectively to guide decisions.

Connect data to people’s lives to drive policy.

Air quality data is most powerful when it reflects how pollution affects daily life. Framing evidence around health, cost of living, mobility, and general quality of life strengthens its relevance and impact. By integrating this evidence with spatial data, cities can better target interventions, prioritise actions, and focus investments on specific areas where the impact will be greatest. Elevating the importance of lived experience data and connecting this to technical findings helps build understanding and support for clean air action.

Put data in the hands of residents to strengthen action.

Supporting residents to access and interpret local air quality data with tools like open data platforms fosters public trust and enables community oversight of clean air action. Through community-led monitoring initiatives that involve residents as active partners in measuring local air quality, cities can expand monitoring coverage, improve local insight, and empower communities as champions for action. Together, these approaches position air quality data as a shared civic resource that empowers communities and supports locally grounded action.

This report is envisioned as a practical guide—including integrated case studies, a toolkit with reflection questions, and links to additional resources—designed to help cities use data more effectively and accelerate progress towards cleaner air, sustainable urban development, and healthier communities.

This toolkit was presented and validated in May 2026 at a Breathe Cities workshop in Mexico City that brought together city officials from 18 global cities.

Download the Full Spanish Report

Download the Spanish Executive Summary

Download the Spanish City Toolkit

Download the Full Portuguese Report

Download the Portuguese Executive Summary

Download the Portuguese City Toolkit

Download the Full Bahasa Indonesian Report

Download the Bahasa Indonesian Executive Summary

Download the Bahasa Indonesian City Toolkit

Download the Full Thai Report

Download the Thai Executive Summary

Download the Thai City Toolkit