The Medellin Pollution Data Pilot

We have a seasonal pollution problem in Medellin. It is the result of economic success and geography and it strikes every year from January to May. The city is growing rapidly with a new middle class buying cars and motorcycles, building modern apartment blocks and demanding global trade. All that success means lots of traffic, with pollution spewing trucks, buses, cars, and motorcycles clogging city streets and choking the air with emissions. 90% of the city's electricity comes from hydro-electric plants, so coal power plants are not a cause of pollution. But industrial factories do add to the problem.

Geography is also contributing. The city sits in a valley that runs North/South, with the floor of the valley at 1400 meters high and the top at 2200 meters. During most of the year wind from the North blows the air pollution out of the valley to the South. But from early January to late April, trade winds change and air pollution accumulates in a cycle that repeats itself each year. While the pollution index hovers between 35 and 55 for most of the city May to December, it averages 65 to 140 from January to May. By comparison the pollution index of San Francisco (a city of similar size to Medellin) averages 4-20 throughout the year.

I didn't notice the air pollution when I first visited the city in August of 2015 because air quality is seasonally better in August. But I did notice it when I arrived in March 2016 to begin my volunteer position as Chief Data Officer for the City of Medellin. Some say you get used to it, but I don't know how you can get used to a fog that envelopes the city and makes it hard to see the building across the street; a sore throat and runny nose that never go away until you leave; and a kind of asthma that makes walking up the copious hills of Medellin a struggle.

Driving to work every day in Medellin is an object lesson in air pollution. Trucks and buses spew huge black clouds of diesel soot, obviously lacking catalytic converters. Thousands of scouters and motorcycles dart in an out of traffic with snarls and growls and a heavy benzine smell. The housing boom means the skyline is full of construction cranes and the air is heavy with concrete dust. This is a city growing faster than its environmental controls and few politicians want to challenge growth with air quality regulations. In the last decade alone the number of 2-stroke motorcyles have grown 1000%, and the bikes are hugely popular with people who don't want to sit in cars waiting in long lines of traffic.

The city did undertake some small steps to curb air pollution but the results have not been effective. They restrict vehicle driving on alternate days based on the last digit of your license plate. Odd digits are restricted on odd days during peak hours, and even digits on even days. This does reduce rush hour traffic. But it doesn't reduce pollution, and punishes all sources of pollution equally regardless of the age of the vehicle, the amount of pollution they emit, or the likelihood of their use during those times. The city also enjoys the best public transportation system in Latin America with a fantastic metro train system, light rail lines, cable cars, and even escalators on the hillsides. But pollution continues to increase with vehicular traffic in proportion to economic growth and public transportation can't scale fast enough.

Sadly, few of the people causing the pollution are even vaguely aware of the health consequences of air pollution. In May 2016, the air quality index in Medellin reached 150 and the Mayor took emergency action by closing down the airport, public schools, and advising citizens to remain indoors. For many citizens of Medellin this event was a shock as it was the first time the city publicly recognized worsening air quality as a public health crisis. Sadly, the vast majority of the 4 million people living in the larger Medellin Metropolitan Area are completely unaware of the short and long term health consequences of exposure to PM2.5 (CO2) and PM10 (dust and mold) air pollution particles.

Not many people in any city are aware of how pollution effects their health because we're all still learning the consequences of air pollution exposure. Many may know it can cause asthma and other lung conditions, but a study published in February links early onset of dementia to long term pollution exposure. A landmark report published last year shows a decades long correlation between lead emissions in gasoline to violent crime in the United States and ten other countries.

But this is information few people in Medellin understand and without this information the public is not empowered to change behaviors, protect themselves, or demand policy changes from politicians. And when it comes to air quality and pollution, we don't have enough data. The city has a great environmental authority, SIATA, that has 8 air quality sensors distributed throughout the city. The data is published in the open on a daily basis but the number of sensors is insufficient to inform city residents about how air pollution is effecting them in their neighborhoods every day. For that level of precision, we need much more data.

We wanted to change that. We wanted to proliferate pollution sensors throughout the city and use the data to inform citizens how pollution levels could impact them locally on a daily basis. But we didn't want to do this as a governmental exercise of deployment and education. We wanted to use the sensors as a means to educate citizens about Data and Pollution by putting the sensors on buildings that mean something to them in their lives and display the data in the open to get it out of computers and into daily life.

In October 2016, we created the Medellin Data Strategy Council to engage private enterprises, NGO's, journalists, data scientists, developers, civil society, and municipal governments in a broader conversation about how data could improve economic growth and social progress and we began discussing air pollution as a common challenge in March 2017. One of our Council members is Makaia, an amazing local non-profit that specializes in working with citizens on technology projects for sustainable development. The Council worked with Makaia to develop a pollution pilot project to install pollution sensors on community sensors, public libraries, and high schools and use the sensors to train and empower communities to learn about Data and Pollution:

1. What is a pollution sensor?
2. It uses lasers. How does a laser measure pollution?
3. It transforms particles detected by the lasers into data. How does it do that?
4. Where does the data go?
5. What is an IoT Server and what do pollution data reports look like?
6. How can we share our pollution data and compare it to the pollution data from other sensors?
7. What do the readings mean and how can we correlate the pollution to health consequences?
8. How should we use this Data in our community?

It is part of the Data Strategy of the City of Medellin to create more data skills and capacity among citizens who never use data for decision making - to lift up those on the bottom with data skills and capacity to help them thrive in the Data Revolution. So we are deploying the pollution sensor in working class and economically challenged communities first.

Last week, the first PurpleAir Pollution Sensor in Latin America went online near the San Diego shopping mall in downtown Medellin and is now transmitting air quality data as Open Data to the citizens of Medellin and the world. Over the next week, five more sensors will go online and Medellin will begin Latin America's first public pilot of citizen generated pollution data as an exercise in Data empowerment. All the data will be published in the Open and made available to anyone who wants to study it. We want to invite everyone to contribute to the growing public understanding of how hyper-local air pollution data improves data literacy, effects community health, and informs and changes public perceptions.

Next week, Makaia begins Sensor deployments with Air Quality Data Workshops in 5 locations throughout Medellin:

1. Tuesday, July 11   time:9:00 am Casa de la Cultural Alcázares 
2. Wednesday, July 12 time: 9:00 am Biblioteca Pública Barrial La Floresta
3. Wednesday, July 12 time: 2:30 pm Parque Biblioteca Gabriel García Márquez Doce de Octubre
4. Thursday, July 13 time: 2:00 pm Biblioteca Familia el Raizal
5. Friday, July 14 time: 4:00 pm Centro de Desarrollo Cultural Moravia

This is Open Data in action in Medellin, Colombia. Educating. Informing. Changing. And Empowering. Lots more to do and learn about pollution and Open Data in the communities that participate and we will update everyone as we go in the most Open and Transparent ways possible.