The State of Global Air Quality Funding 2026

Air quality is critical for economies, health, and climate, and must be integral to development funding. Given the heavy burden imposed on health, wellbeing, the environment and the economy by air pollution, international development funders have a critical role to play in supporting interventions that improve air quality.

Understanding where international development funding is flowing, what it supports, and where gaps remain in relation to air quality is key to using increasingly limited development funding resources effectively. The annual State of Global Air Quality Funding report works to provide this global overview. Published by the Clean Air Fund, with data and analysis from Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), it tracks international development funding relevant to air quality and examines how it is distributed across geographies, sectors, funders, and instruments.

This eighth edition of the report analyses international development funding related to air quality through 2024, using the latest available project-level data from development finance institutions and governments. It presents the latest year-on-year data alongside rolling five-year totals (for 2019-2023 and 2020-2024) to provide a medium-term perspective. The report distinguishes between outdoor air quality funding, where improving air quality is an explicit project objective, and funding with outdoor air quality co-benefits, where projects primarily pursue other objectives while also reducing air pollution. These categories are also considered together, as ‘total air quality funding’.

The analysis is based on a methodology developed and progressively refined by the Clean Air Fund and CPI. The report also examines finance that can work against clean air objectives by analysing fossil fuel-prolonging funding, providing important context for understanding the wider alignment of development finance with air quality goals.

The 2026 edition further develops the report’s analysis of super pollutants that affect both air quality and climate. It examines funding for black carbon and, for the first time, finance targeting tropospheric ozone and its precursor pollutants, providing additional insights on the extent to which international development finance explicitly targets these pollutants.

While this report focuses on international development funding, Clean Air Fund also produces an annual analysis of philanthropic funding for air quality.

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Copyright and citation

This report is published under a Creative Commons By-Share Alike licence, meaning users are free to use and build on this information, provided any resulting works cite this report where relevant and the resulting work is shared under the same licence.

How to cite: Clean Air Fund (2026). The State of Global Air Quality Funding 2026. London: Clean Air Fund.