In cooperation with the Georgian NGO GreenPole, we continue to build an “AirGE” network of citizen monitoring of air quality. This is all part of a wider effort to make sure that people have the right to know what's going on and to be involved in making decisions about the environment.
Inspired by Arnika's long-standing work on the citizen monitoring network in Ukraine, AirGE monitoring stations enable relatively inexpensive but functional air quality monitoring. It's great to see that residents of Georgian cities, can now easily check the current status of air quality online. This is really helpful for people who have been concerned about pollution from traffic and industry for a long time.
GreenPole also issues reports to the quarter-million followers of its "My City Kills" campaign, which has been raising awareness about the health risks of intense urban air pollution for a long time. It's so important to keep locals informed about what they are breathing! How does it look like?
Reporting on the state of the air in the Georgia’s capital in a simple form: on the left message "The air in Tbilisi is good", on the right "it is bad". More detailed data (e.g. on concentration dangerous particulate matter, PM 2.5) is provided by a more detailed map involving the respective stations.
Thirty-one stations were installed last year, and another thirty were be added this year - with even more planned. In addition to (in)famously polluted Tbilisi, AirGE also provide data from Rustavi, Chiatura, Kaspi and Mtskheta. And the network will continue to expand.
On the 8th and 9th of June, a workshop and meeting were held to discuss the future strategy. In other words, how to identify locations where pollution levels – and therefore public interest in the available data – are particularly high and to achieve an overall expansion of citizen air quality monitoring across Georgia. Current technical limitations of the AirGE stations, or the different methods by which data can be processed and presented, were also discussed.
The joint activities with GreenPole form part of the project Strengthening the civic campaigns for a better environment in Georgia which is being implemented within the framework of the Transition Promotion Programme of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic.
We have been working together on Georgia's air quality for a long time. Last year, in cooperation with World from Space, we published an for-the-region-unique study mapping pollution through images from European Copernicus satellites and an in-depth analysis of the Georgian state air quality monitoring system prepared by an expert from the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute.
