NSF Abstract

The American Lung Association stated that air quality, in particular that which contains large amount of particulate matter in urban settings, is a serious health problem for residents. In addition, for many parts of the U.S, government owned and maintained air monitoring equipment and data does not have the spatial resolution to provide communities, especially those in low income heavily polluted areas, with air quality data. This Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) planning process brings together a science team with local community and civic organizations to co-design a science/research-based, implementable, scalable, and sustainable solution that addresses air quality, an important local community resilience problem in one of the Pittsburgh, low income, urban neighborhoods. This CIVIC planning activity supports infrastructure for the collection of local air quality data, a user-friendly platform that provides real or near real time data and its visualization and analysis. It also provides education and training of community members in advocacy that allow them to effectively work with local governments and other entities to improve air quality. The planning process will bring together all relevant stakeholders and community residents to co-design the low-cost air monitoring network and advocacy education and training regimen. Broader impacts include a community-based air monitoring network that will provide hyperlocal, real-time, air quality data to increase community education and awareness of air quality and its impacts on their health and lives and provide essential data to allow community advocacy for interventions and mitigation strategies thereby improving community health and well-being.

The project involves installation of low-cost air quality measurement and monitoring infrastructure to support a network of community scientists with online accessible tools to collect community air quality data, share individual and collective narratives about local environmental issues, and support the community in helping them know how to critically analyze data to build a science and data-driven advocacy campaign for improved community air quality. The project team will develop community training and education programs about air quality data, data analysis literacy, and how the data can be used for advocacy. Another objective is to design, with partners, and implement a community-engaged and participatory action approach to improving local air quality. An online data visualization platform will be developed to provide community members access to real-time air quality data that can be used to improve understanding, awareness of the impacts of compromised air quality to help individuals and the community advocate for action. This planning process will improve the understanding of how community-based efforts can be designed to lead to policy changes. It will also foster and strengthen collaboration between researchers and community stakeholders, develop new collaborations and partnerships, refine the research vision to enable submission of a successful follow-on proposal that will implement the community vision and provide data to address research questions and develop evaluation methods and measures for the follow-on project. Through this approach, the project team feels the activities and anticipated outcomes can be replicated in other similar urban communities facing similar challenges.

This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program?s Track B. Bridging the gap between essential resources and services & community needs and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. The proposal is co-funded by the NSF Directorate for Geosciences and Directorate for Computer Information Science and Engineering.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Award Abstract #2431262