The 12th Better Air Quality conference opened with a call to treat clean air as vital economic infrastructure, highlighting the large benefit-cost return – but financing clean-tech is a challenge in developing nations.

BANGKOK – Short-term impacts of bad air quality don’t just cause high economic costs but also lead to children scoring poorly in tests, warned a World Bank senior official at the opening of the Better Air Quality (BAQ) conference on Wednesday. 

The option to invest in cleaner air results in healthier people and stronger economies. Failure to do so means countries will continue to bear the costs of pollution –  in hospitals, in lost productivity, and in weakened economies, says Bindu Lohani, chair of Clean Air Asia, BAQ’s main organiser. 

A significant concern for the BAQ conference is how to increase financing for clean air action. It costs about 0.1% of regional GDP annually to roll out the most effective measures, a World Bank report estimates, while the benefit-cost ratio can be more than 9:1 for countries like Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

Lohani called on governments to treat clean air as core economic infrastructure and set targets to achieve the net-zero climate target by 2050.

By 2030, governments should significantly reduce urban particulate pollution, electrify transport systems, expand monitoring, and eliminate the most polluting fuels and practices, such as agricultural and open burning, Lohani proposed. By 2040, air quality should be fully aligned with climate policy and on a path to achieve the 2050 target. 

The World Bank’s Ann Jeanette Glauber acknowledged that tools such as emissions inventories and enforcement capacity are “essential public goods, but they aren’t sexy”. 

“There’s no ribbon cutting. Often, they don’t make money, necessarily,” Glauber said, adding that the most financially viable solution is to focus on industry.

“For us in South and Southeast Asia, the main sources of emissions are industries.  And these need clean tech boilers, furnaces, kilns and pollution control devices,” she said, adding that there were limited resources to roll these out.

Tussle over clean-tech finance

Reena Gupta, chairperson of the Punjab Pollution Control Board, said there is very little money flowing into developing countries to assist with air pollution.

Citing the clean tech projects presented at her panel discussion, Gupta said that while they are excellent, they are “only pilots”. 

In Punjab in north India, most furnaces in a town known for metal recycling are still being run on coal:  “We know the clean technology exists. But it is not viable for the recycling businesses,” she said.

Gupta proposed that the international finance agencies develop mechanisms to cover risk for businesses to change to cleaner technology for the first couple of years, after which costs can be borne by the business. 

In contrast, the World Bank’s Glauber suggested that affected countries should first leverage things like their finance policies, “then investment flows…  It’s really about helping commercial finance go into those actual technologies, and you’re basically pushing them over that cost barrier so that they become financially viable.”

Citing Nepal’s example, Glauber said that the government made it far cheaper to import electric than fossil fuel vehicles. It is now one of the fastest electric vehicle markets in the world, and has the second highest electric vehicle only to Norway, in terms of electric vehicle penetration.

“You play with those [policy] levers, and then investment flows. Obviously, lots to be done in risk-sharing mechanisms that crowd-in private finance for industrial pollution control technology. That’s where the magic needs to happen,” Glauber said.

‘Exporting air pollution’

Wealthier nations are also offloading their obsolete and polluting products in the region.

“We have had to shut down a few tyre pyrolysis units (in Punjab) that were not deploying proper air pollution control devices. Latest reports have shown that waste tyres are being sent to India from the UK and the Middle East. This is becoming a big source of black carbon, a super pollutant,” she told Health Policy Watch.

A study by philanthropic organisation Clean Air Fund (CAF) shows that measures to prevent air pollution are massively underfunded and funding does not reach populations with the highest exposure. 

Despite the 9:1 benefit-cost advantage, and despite studies that put premature deaths because of air pollution at 8.1 million in 2021, air quality solutions receive 1% of international development funding, according to CAF. This too saw a 20% decrease between 2022 and 2023. 

Bangkok is turning the tide on air pollution

The BAQ was last held in Bangkok 18 years ago. City officials say much has changed since then. Along with the economy and skyline growing, air pollution is a “visible” problem. 

“On the worst days, parents keep their children indoors, hospitals fill with patients, and the residents lose their trust that the government is doing anything at all,” says PornphromVikitsreth Techapaiboon, chief sustainability officer of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, speaking at the opening session. 

But there have been measurable improvements in the last year in reducing PM2.5 pollution, he added. The number of “orange and red’ (poor air quality) days has almost halved since 2015 and the PM2.5 concentration fell from nearly 50 micrograms per cubic metre to 37.6, a 22% decrease. 

These, he says, are “genuine turning points” and that “PM2.5-related patients have decreased in January.”

The causes of air pollution are unfavourable geography (Bangkok is in a basin), vehicular, especially diesel pollution, and biomass burning, as shown by their “dust detective” teams with experts from academia and civil society organisations. 

This has led Bangkok to create an air quality strategy, declaring itself last year to be a pollution control zone. This includes working with upwind provinces where biomass is burnt, leading to more burn-free days. It introduced a ‘green list’ for heavy trucks that are banned from Bangkok unless they can show evidence of recent maintenance. Industrial monitoring is being ramped up.

Pornphrom says they’re investing in green spaces, not just for aesthetics, but as a public health intervention. PM2.5 levels inside parks are 33-43% lower than in surrounding areas. They message seven-day PM2.5 forecasts and are installing ‘clean air rooms’ in schools. 

Thailand is emerging as a test case for integrated air quality and climate investment, the conference heard. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) presented a proposed Thailand Integrated Air Quality Investment Program. 

The proposal outlines a 10-year investment platform aligned with Thailand’s PM2.5 Action Plan and forthcoming Clean Air Act, designed to bring together multiple sectors under a single framework.Priority areas include transport electrification, crop residue management, renewable energy expansion and industrial emission standards.

The ADB referenced a programme in Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei in China, where coordinated action across sectors, including fuel switching, clean heating, and industrial upgrading, helped reduce PM2.5 levels by around 40% compared to 2015.

At the city level, Bangkok also highlighted the need for sustained partnerships.

“Air pollution is a complex challenge that no single city can solve alone. Sustainable air quality improvement requires long-term investment and strong international collaboration,” said Pornthep.

Image Credits: UN Thailand, Chetan Bhattacharji.