Lauren Azmon Publishes Blog on Improving Air Quality and Mitigating Climate Change

The USAID-funded Building Healthy Cities (BHC) project is a five-year cooperative started in September of 2017 and implemented by JSI. BHC tests healthy urban planning approaches in Indore, India; Makassar, Indonesia; Kathmandu, Nepal; and Da Nang, Vietnam. BHC is committed to documenting its processes, successes, and failures to bolster global learning on urban health approaches.

Lauren Azmon, JSI’s program officer with the Center for Healthy Women, Children and Communities, recently published a blog for the USAID on How Community Partners are the Key to Improving Air Quality and Mitigating Climate Change. In the blog, Lauren explains that one way to improve air quality and promote positive climate outcomes is to lift the voices and increase awareness of people who live with the sources of pollution. As an example, Lauren describes a microcosm of the work happening in Indore, India to mitigate air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

The Building Healthy Cities (BHC) project is working to increase community participation in air pollution mitigation. So far, BHC has installed 20 low-cost air quality sensors across Indore to collect quantitative data and trained 20 clean air guides to receive the real-time data on the quality of the air in their location. In addition to analyzing and sharing the data with community members, the clean air guides are developing creative solutions to mitigate air pollution including distributing free tree saplings and encouraging crematoriums to improve body-burning practices.