Air Pollution, Citizen Data Collectives and Communication Agenda Setting in Colombia

Abstract

Air pollution levels in the cities of Bogotá and Medellín (Colombia) are now reaching dangerous levels, as measured by the few government monitoring stations available and operative. So far, government actions have focused on enforcing private car and industrial emission limits, prohibiting the circulation of vehicles for a few days during particularly polluted periods and vague promises of switching a percentage of public transport vehicles to alternative power. Official measurements are increasingly being reported in the national and local media, as well as through social media, but citizen distrust of their quality has mounted. Citizen collectives are starting to work designing low-cost mobile sensors, monitoring pollution in some areas and in public transport, sharing their georeferenced data over the internet and trying to raise awareness of the dangers of pollution and the necessity of radical actions to deal with the problem. This paper describes the current actions of some of these citizen collectives and their results in setting the media and public agenda on air pollution problems.

Citizen Science for One Digital Health: A Rapid Qualitative Review of Studies in Air Quality with Reflections on a Conceptual Model

“…Initiators in the case studies represented place-based initiatives and public and environmental health policy and governance interests, resulting in a mix of collaborations involving university researchers, health agencies, and civicgovernment partnerships. In two studies, citizen instigators approached research experts to support their community air quality projects (Rohlman et al 2019;Valencia and Fonseca 2019). Existing environmental literacy collaborations generated other community-focused projects, such as Citizen Sense (Gabrys 2017) and the Los Angeles County youth environmental justice project (Johnston et al 2019).…”

“…Project-trained citizens were involved in building sensors in the CANAirIO (Valencia and Fonseca 2019) and Citizen Sense (Gabrys 2017) projects, as well as using them to independently record data, and then undertaking collective analysis to inform local government or policy makers (Lepenies and Zakari 2021). In some cases, citizens could download a publicly available app and record data or address a questionnaire about localised air quality (Hsu et al 2020;Che et al 2020).…”

“…Varaden et al (2021) noted that 400 primary schools in Greater London were in areas of high air pollution, exceeding the annual mean NO 2 EU Limit Values and PM2.5 concentrations. In the global south, concentrated levels of PM 10 are the most significant air pollutant in Bogotá, Columbia, with about 50% related to vehicular traffic emissions (Valencia and Fonseca 2019).…”

“…The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community study (Rohlman et al 2019) and the Citizen Sense project (Gabrys 2017) were located outside urban environments. Studies in low-income, racially and culturally diverse neighbourhoods, such as the Los Angeles County youth environmental justice program (Johnston et al 2019) and CANAirIO in Bogota (Valencia and Fonseca 2019), reported the most degraded air quality, due to road systems or industrial sites.…”

“…The availability of low-cost portable monitoring devices reported in the case studies, including consumer technologies such as AirBeams and open-source kits, support citizen self-assembly (Valencia and Fonseca 2019;Gabrys 2017). An earlier rapid review found that, compared with low-cost sensors, state-run sensor networks tended to have limited geographic coverage, raising citizen concerns about inaccurate local air quality assessment (Carvlin et al 2017).…”