Recommendations for development donors

1. Make air quality an explicit target of project design to ensure that air quality improvement metrics are intrinsic to investment outcomes.

Embedding air quality objectives and indicators in project appraisal, monitoring, and evaluation frameworks can improve accountability, enable more robust impact measurement, and strengthen the evidence base for future investment decisions.

2. Tailor financing to overcome barriers to access.

International development funders should adapt financing approaches to enable countries with less developed financial markets and limited borrowing capacity to access air quality funding. Greater use of concessional finance, technical assistance, and blended finance, alongside financing through capable utilities, transport operators, private companies and other service providers, can help overcome investment risks, capacity constraints and restrictions on public borrowing.

3. Embed air quality into national policy frameworks and funder strategies to sustain funding gains over time.

Actors should embed air quality objectives in national policy frameworks and long-term financing strategies to support sustained funding. This should be supported by predictable, multi-year financing that enables countries to maintain and scale interventions beyond individual project cycles, embedding air quality gains over time, even as emissions patterns evolve.

4. Expand regional financing approaches to address transboundary pollution and reduce reliance on country-level debt.

Given the dominance of debt within air quality funding, development finance providers should expand regional, airshed and transboundary financing approaches that pool resources and risks across participating countries and institutions. Such approaches can reduce the financing burden on individual governments while directing investment towards pollution at the geographic scale at which it occurs and delivering air quality and public health benefits across borders.

5. Prioritise super pollutants to maximise the impact of air quality funding.

Funders should explicitly target super pollutants such as black carbon, as well as tropospheric ozone and its precursors to deliver rapid air quality improvements along with climate and health benefits. These simultaneous benefits make super pollutant abatement a particularly high-impact use of constrained development finance. Funders should target ozone precursors based on local understanding of ozone formation to avoid the risk of unintended increases in ozone, and combine interventions with monitoring.