CleanAirNowKC: Building Community Power by Improving Data Accessibility
This work addresses air pollution monitoring for community organizations in Kansas City, but it is incremental as it builds on existing sensor deployments with a new data accessibility tool.
The paper tackled the problem of air pollution in Kansas City by implementing an interactive map for community monitoring and reporting of air quality and industrial emissions, resulting in a tool that helps identify pollution contributors and supports advocacy for policy changes.
As cities continue to grow globally, air pollution is increasing at an alarming rate, causing a significant negative impact on public health. One way to affect the negative impact is to regulate the producers of such pollution through policy implementation and enforcement. CleanAirNowKC (CAN-KC) is an environmental justice organization based in Kansas City (KC), Kansas. As part of their organizational objectives, they have to date deployed nine PurpleAir air quality sensors in different locations about which the community has expressed concern. In this paper, we have implemented an interactive map that can help the community members to monitor air quality efficiently. The system also allows for reporting and tracking industrial emissions or toxic releases, which will further help identify major contributors to pollution. These resources can serve an important role as evidence that will assist in advocating for community-driven just policies to improve the air quality regulation in Kansas City.