World Bank Project: Technical Assistance to Measure Air Pollution

The objective of this project is to support Pakistan’s Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) through technical assistance to measure intra-urban variation in air pollution across Lahore; this is done using air quality sensors installed systematically across the city.

As part of the CCDR, the Poverty and Equity Global Practice at the World Bank is looking to assess socio-economic variation in vulnerability to disaster risk related to climate change. One important activity of the CCDR is to understand the distributional variation and impact of air pollution in Lahore. Air pollution is not only hazardous for public health, but is also an amplifier of other climate risks, such as flooding and heat waves. Despite being ranked regularly amongst the topmost polluted cities in the world, however, ground-level, hyperlocal air pollution data is not available for Lahore due to a lack of continuous, distributional air quality monitoring in the city.

The project involves the following activities:

• Creation of a deployment experimental design that captures socioeconomic and physical variation across the city. This design takes into account existing sensors that have already been deployed in the city through other efforts, for example, Punjab University air quality monitoring project, and IQair.com sensors.
• Deployment of 75 sensors across Lahore based on above experimental design.
• Maintenance of sensors in the city for an initial period of one year, including continuous power supply, network connectivity, data streaming, sensor cleaning, and coordination with vendors for technical support.