Urban air pollution is hazardous to health and the institutional capacity to address this issue is limited in the developing countries due to the lack of organized data or simple analytical tools that may help support decision making.
Most available tools are complex and data-intensive and there is a need
for a new generation of simple interactive tools that recognize the cities information and
institutional challenges. Hence, SIM-air.
There is also a need to rapidly scale-up the use of analytical tools for not only the rapidly expanding megacities but also secondary and tertiary cities with significant air pollution problems.
Modern IT advances and networking offers a tremendous opportunity to develop simple tools to help city managers, regulators, academia, and the citizen groups to develop a coordinated knowledge base and analytical approaches to address integrated urban air quality management in an effective manner.
New - SIM-air Working Paper Series covers discussion on how to conduct air quality modeling using available information and resources (info blog) and shares examples (see SIM-Cities) from Africa, Asia, Latin America.
Cities applications in varying capacities are Hyderabad, Delhi, and Pune (India), Hanoi (Vietnam), Bangkok (Thailand), Shanghai and Shijiazhuang (China), Lagos (Nigeria), Tana (Madagascar), Santiago (Chile), and Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia).