Challenge prizes for clean air

Challenge prizes for clean air Sarah Holliday October 2020

Air pollution contributes to tens of thousands of UK deaths each year and may also be a key co-morbidity factor for COVID-19, but there are still significant challenges when it comes to tracking pollution levels with the accuracy and detail needed. Challenge prizes could stimulate a new generation of pollution monitoring solutions to help us decrease emissions effectively and safeguard public health. • To reduce air pollution and save lives, policymakers and other stakeholders need accurate, timely information about pollution levels in a certain area. • Current technologies for monitoring air pollution are either expensive and cumbersome, or low-cost but inaccurate and poorly regulated. • To solve this problem, we need new sensor technologies to detect and quantify pollution levels with better accuracy, providing people with the information needed to drive change.

Our vision Multiple air pollution sensors are available on the market, but there are significant challenges to making one that offers the reliable, accurate information and spatial coverage needed for planners, policymakers and citizens to make informed decisions. The current status quo technologies, in particular the portable, consumer technologies, typically do not offer data that is accurate enough to compare against regulatory standards, or

The Great Innovation Challenge: Challenge Prizes for Clean Air

sensitive enough to reliably detect low levels of some pollutants. While other methods have been explored, nothing has come to market yet that meets the cost and accuracy requirements simultaneously. In addition, there is a need to better manipulate and use this data in the context of other variables such as health, transport and other datasets, in order to better understand this complex issue.

Challenge prizes in this area could incentivise innovators from across science, engineering and other disciplines to develop breakthrough solutions that transform our approach to tackling air quality – in the UK and across the world. Prizes would be designed to ensure that the sensor technologies developed would be low-cost, accurate and designed for real world applications, offering rich and reliable data, as well as practical ways to manipulate and use that data, that can empower citizens and policymakers to safeguard our public health.

The challenges and their context Man-made air pollution is increasingly recognised as a significant health risk, contributing to an estimated 28,000 to 36,000 UK deaths each year,1 with both short and long-term exposure increasing risks of chronic diseases including asthma, heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), among others. This also comes at a huge public cost, with estimates that the 2017 cost to NHS and social care from man-made air pollution in England alone was ÂŁ157 million.2 There is also increasing evidence to suggest a positive correlation between air pollution exposure and adverse health outcomes from COVID-19,3 which further amplifies the health inequalities dimension of these issues. Studies have also demonstrated that socioeconomically disadvantaged groups in the UK are exposed to much higher concentrations of air pollution, as well as carrying a greater burden of poor health that may make them more susceptible to its health effects.4 Air pollution consists of a complex mixture of gaseous (NO2, O3 etc) and particulate matter (PM2.5, PM10) contributions from transport and industry, as well as indoor emissions (VOCs) from household products. The relative levels of these pollutants vary considerably according to time, weather, location and other variables, which makes it vital to have accurate and highly localised data to inform the actions of policymakers, local governments, transport providers and, most crucially, citizens in safeguarding our health. In particular, there is a need for better methods to track total personal exposure for those who may be more vulnerable to the effects of air pollution - enabling individuals to change their daily habits such as when and where they go out, and enabling policymakers and planners to re-design cities and transport networks to limit the production of, and exposure to, harmful emissions.

However, the current technologies are not able to provide this quality of data and/or link it with the wider context of health, transport and other datasets to enable informed and intelligent decisions.

Most gaseous monitors at the moment are based on electrochemical or metal oxide semiconductor technologies. While electrochemical sensors offer good sensitivity, accurate calibration poses a major challenge due to interference from other compounds as well as varying in response to environmental conditions.5 Meanwhile, the majority of particulate matter (PM) sensors are based on light refraction. Since different kinds of particles scatter light in different ways, the calibration factors obtained for one type of particle may not always be appropriate, making results often unreliable.6

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The Great Innovation Challenge: Challenge Prizes for Clean Air

Researchers have developed various approaches to overcome these limitations, but these compensating additions make the products more expensive whilst still not meeting the monitoring needs. Users are faced with a trade-off between expensive, regulatory-grade monitors (as used for stationary monitoring stations) on the one hand, or else ineffective, low-cost, distributed sensors (those used in consumer grade sensors) on the other. While the stationary monitors offer limited information on personal exposure due to poor spatial coverage, the portable sensors are generally too variable and unreliable in their results for policymakers to design effective and targeted interventions.7 Alongside the technology development, it is equally important to ensure that the data generated can be accessed, analysed and used to the best effect in order to improve air quality as a result.

There is a great need and opportunity to develop a new generation of air quality sensors based on a different underlying technology, as well as designing innovative ways to use and manipulate the data being generated for public benefit.

The role of innovation Monitoring any gas or particulate matter with accuracy and precision at very low concentrations and in real-world environments is extremely challenging, especially when trying to find a method that is low-cost and stable over time. Alternative approaches to gas and particulate sensing already exist, and some of these have been tested in air quality monitoring applications.8 However, there is still a need gap in the technology transfer of developing these approaches and their corresponding business models for practical, non laboratory applications.

The UK is already a world leader in air pollution research and mapping Imperial College London recently announced a new global centre for air pollution research, as well as leading on the London Air Quality Network – the most comprehensive urban monitoring network in Europe with over 25 years of detailed information on London’s pollution.9 The Turing Institute is also working on better ways to use data that is collected from existing monitoring stations, developing machine learning and data science platforms to better understand and improve air quality over London.10 This created an opportunity to combine some of the cutting edge research on mapping and manipulating pollution data, with new monitoring technologies that can provide larger, richer and more reliable data sets.

Better monitoring and control of air pollution is a priority area for both industry and the UK government, with organisations like the rail industry body RSSB bringing out a strategic framework on monitoring, modelling and mitigating air pollution,11 while Defra is supporting a number of research networks around air pollution monitoring including the Black Carbon Network run by NPL.12 The cross-cutting nature of this problem also means that it is of equal interest to the health sector, with Public Health England producing its own analysis of effective interventions.13 This intersectionality means that there is opportunity for equally diverse and interdisciplinary approaches to measuring and tracking pollution, which open innovation competitions such as challenge prizes could address.

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The Great Innovation Challenge: Challenge Prizes for Clean Air

By opening this problem up to diverse innovators across research, industry, technology and public health, we can expect new and innovative approaches to generating and using pollution data. By bringing these innovations to life, we can provide citizens, industry and policymakers with accurate information about the levels of different pollutants, how they vary in terms of time, weather, location and other factors, and how this interacts with our human and planetary health. Empowered with this information, stakeholders can make informed decisions about how to effectively reduce emissions.

In complex, cross-cutting sectors such as air quality, our research and past prizes show that the impacts can extend far beyond the specific technologies developed. A challenge prize can also help to: • Galvanise action around a shared vision: by setting strategic objectives for air quality monitoring in the UK, they could help focus attention on particular gaps or opportunities around mitigation as well.

• Give credibility and visibility to teams working on them: by signalling government support and independent validation, they could help attract publicity and investment to teams taking part.

• Demonstrate the benefits of technologies developed: by building demonstrations into the judging of the prize, as well as providing access to facilities such as lab testing and public sector ‘testbed’ opportunities, prizes could help demonstrate and drive adoption of the innovations created.

Opportunities for challenge prizes 1. Low-cost monitoring station prize: Develop a new, lower cost sensor technology for accurately monitoring gaseous and/or particulate air pollutants in a fixed location The most accurate and reliable air pollution monitors currently available are bulky and extremely expensive, meaning that local government and industry are the only bodies able to generate the type of high-quality data needed for decision making. This prize would incentivise new gas and/or particulate monitoring sensor technologies, validated in real world settings, that can provide accurate, reliable data. Devices should also be significantly lower in cost than current solutions, whilst holding their calibration for ideally one year. They should also be of a practical size to be accessible for schools, community groups and other interested parties to take measurements or set up a real low cost sensor network.

2. Integrated pollution data prize: Develop a new approach to tracking air pollution and combining this data with other datasets to generate new insights and inform action Air pollution is a cross-cutting issue, touching on environmental impacts, public health, and the science and technology involved in monitoring it. This prize calls for new integrated solutions enabled by novel sensor technologies to capture accurate and sophisticated pollution data, combined with data science approaches that utilise public health, weather, climate and other datasets. Solutions will generate a rich body of data on how air pollution interacts with other health, climate and socioeconomic factors, helping to inform policymakers and other stakeholders on the appropriate mitigating actions.

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The Great Innovation Challenge: Challenge Prizes for Clean Air

3. Personal exposure prize: Develop a new sensor technology to accurately monitor an individual’s total personal exposure to air pollution (outdoor and indoor) Accurately measuring total personal exposure to air pollution is especially important to certain groups who are vulnerable to its effect, such as asthma sufferers. This prize would incentivise new sensor technologies to measure an individual’s exposure to a high degree of spatiotemporal resolution in real-world settings (outdoor and indoor). Solutions should also present the data in a clear and actionable way to empower individuals and policymakers with the information needed for decision making.

4. Agricultural emissions prize Ammonia emissions from agriculture are one of the fastest growing sources of air pollution, but monitoring these emissions on a local level is a real challenge due to the lack of accurate data provided by current technologies, making policymakers reliant on modelling. This prize would incentivise new, low-cost ammonia sensors that can provide accurate and highly localised pollution data on farms, enabling farmers and policymakers to work together to identify pollution hotspots and take remedial action.

Endnotes 1. Public Health England, Associations of long-term average concentrations of nitrogen dioxide with mortality, 2018.

2. Public Health England, Estimation of costs to the NHS and social care due to the health impacts of air pollution: summary report, 2018.

3. Bhaskar et al. Air pollution, SARS-CoV-2 transmission, and COVID-19 outcomes: A state-of-the-science review of a rapidly evolving research area, MedRxiv (preprint), Aug 2020.

4. G. Walker et al., Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer 2017, 2017.

5. D. Hagan et al., MIT Open Access, Calibration and assessment of electrochemical air quality sensors by colocation with regulatory-grade instruments, 2018.

6. M. Badura et al., Journal of Sensors, Evaluation of Low-Cost Sensors for Ambient PM2.5 Monitoring, 2018.

7. A. Lewis et al., Faraday Discuss. Evaluating the performance of low cost chemical sensors for air pollution research, 2015.

8. Environmental Protection Agency, Evaluation of Emerging Air Sensor Performance.

9. A. Scheuber, New global centre of air pollution research as Frank Kelly group joins Imperial, March 2020.

10. Research found at: https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/london-air-quality 11. GB Rail Industry, Air Quality Strategic Framework, June 2020.

12. Research found at: https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/network-info?view=ukbsn 13. Public Health England, Review of interventions to improve outdoor air quality and public health, 2019.

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The Great Innovation Challenge: Challenge Prizes for Clean Air

Further information Nesta Challenges Nesta Challenges exists to design and run challenge prizes that help solve pressing problems that lack solutions. We shine a spotlight where it matters and incentivise people to solve these issues. We are independent supporters of change to help communities thrive and inspire the best placed, most diverse groups of people around the world to take action.

We support the boldest and bravest ideas to become real, and seed long term change to advance society and build a better future for everyone. We are part of the innovation foundation, Nesta. A full list of our current challenge prizes is available on our website at www.challenges.org

To discuss the content of this challenge brief, contact: Sarah Holliday, Researcher, Nesta Challenges sarah.holliday@nesta.org.uk

58 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DS +44 (0)20 7438 2500 challenges@nesta.org.uk @NestaChallenges www.challenges.org Nesta is a registered charity in England and Wales with company number 7706036 and charity number 1144091.

Registered as a charity in Scotland number SCO42833. Registered office: 58 Victoria Embankment, London, EC4Y 0DS.

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