Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $1,308,342 over three years to the University of California, Berkeley to support their work on modeling air pollution in South Asia.
UC Berkeley will be working to develop a modeling tool called PAVITRA (air Pollution mAnagement and interVentIon Tool foR IndiA) in collaboration with the Center for Study of Science, Technology, and Policy, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and the University of Washington. This is one of four grants we will be making to support this collaboration.
PAVITRA will pair an inventory of emissions in India with a modeling platform that converts changes in emissions to changes in pollution concentrations. This tool will make it much easier to understand the pollution and health impacts of interventions targeting a given source of emissions.
Open Philanthropy’s team sees a lack of cost-benefit analysis as a major gap in air quality management in India and the rest of South Asia. They anticipate that PAVITRA may be used by policymakers or researchers to improve their policy analyses and prioritize the most impactful policies, with a high impact on health outcomes in expectation.
This grant falls within Open Philanthropy’s focus area of South Asian air quality.