Ghana’s Environmental Protection Authority has partnered with one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world, Columbia University, to address air pollution.
The two institutions will use the Gridded Africa Surface Pollution (GRASP), described by the EPA as a cutting-edge satellite and machine learning dataset, to track air pollution (PM2.5) across Ghana, even in areas without ground-based air quality monitors.
According to Columbia, the partnership with Ghana’s EPA on this project, supported by the Clean Air Fund, is expected to help provide a publicly accessible, open-source spatiotemporal PM2.5 dataset for Ghana over the last two and a half decades.
“We leverage a robust and growing Ghana-wide network of well-calibrated low-cost PM2.5 monitors, reference monitors, and satellite remote sensing parameters to quantify PM2.5 levels. The project integrates aerosol optical parameters, additional gas-phase pollutant data from NASA and weather parameters retrievals from the European Space Agency to build machine learning models for estimating highly accurate daily PM2.5 concentrations at a 1 km2 spatial resolution across Ghana,” Columbia University said about the project.
The State of Global Air 2025 report confirmed that air pollution remains a significant threat to lives in Ghana, with 32,500 confirmed deaths in 2023.
The figure is a nearly two percent rise from the previous year, which saw about 31,900 deaths in the country attributed to air pollution.
However, the Portfolio Manager at Breathe Cities, Dr Elvis Kyere-Gyeabour, has indicated that data on the deaths from air pollution in Ghana may be understated and might even exceed public estimates.
He believes the already significant number of deaths reported from air pollution might be lower than the actual number.
“If you ask me, I still think more people die from air pollution than even the estimates we have, because we do not have all the data and all the numbers aligned.
One of the major areas of concern has been the lack of air quality monitors to record air pollution data.
Through this collaboration with Columbia, the EPA suggests it will have access to more complete air quality data across Ghana and more science-backed evidence to influence policies to ensure clean air.
The EPA says the partnership is being formalised through a Memorandum of Understanding with Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
