Inspiration

A lesson package for pupils in the 5th and 6th grades or pupils in groups 6, 7 and 8 about air quality.

The DEVA (Dynamic Exposure Visualisation App) allows you to explore air quality and traffic congestion in your area in various ways.

Fire and cosiness, two things that are strongly connected in our minds. But burning wood also has a downside: the smoke is unhealthy and sometimes causes nuisance in the neighborhood.

The City of Bruges is committed to the further development of a sustainable measuring network throughout the city. Through traffic counts with smart cameras at a number of mobility hubs, the City monitors the various modes of transport and links these to air quality measurements (fine dust, nitrogen dioxide, ozone). We then simulate the effect of various measures that improve air quality on the mobility network. In this way, the impact of the modal shift, one-way traffic or a school street can be examined. Using these tools, the city will draw up a substantiated air quality action plan with concrete actions to improve local air quality in the coming years.

Within the LIFE CityTRAQ project, we are working together on a future with clean air. The goal is clear: better air quality for our cities. For example, the city of Ghent will check the impact on the air quality of a school street o as well as evaluate the district mobility plans.

Members of the Hovese environmental council went out with particulate matter sensors in the first months of 2024 to map local sources of air pollution. Much more than traffic, wood smoke stood out as a local source.

With the help of the European project COMPAIR, residents of the Vogelkeswijk in the city of Sint-Niklaas have been given a say in the evaluation of temporary traffic measures based on sensor data and by means of data cafés. This was prior to the development of garden streets in their neighbourhood.

The Municipality of Utrecht will ban the burning of wood in the home from 2030. From 2025, it will be forbidden to make a campfire outdoors or burn wood in a fire basket, for example. In this way, the municipality hopes to improve the air quality in the city.

In January 2025, De Krekel primary school in Ghent welcomed a special new ‘pupil’: a robot at the school gate. QBOT was no ordinary robot, but a smart way to make children aware of air quality and sustainable mobility. The initiative is part of the LIFE CityTRAQ project, in which the City of Ghent is collaborating with VMM and IMEC.

If a city or municipality wants to tackle mobility and traffic safety together with its residents, it is necessary to gain insight into the existing situation. Residents can do this via an abacus. With the support of the municipality or the city, residents for an abacus can receive better support in their residential area.

It's nice to light a fire basket, but what effect does this have on air quality and health?

The city of Aalst had the concentration of NO2, nitrogen dioxide, in the air measured by the VMM in the city centre. The measurements show that the concentration has dropped significantly, with a calculated decrease of an average of 16 µg/m³ or 44% compared to 2018.

Citizen sensors fill in the blind spots on the particulate matter map during a massive forest fire

Are citizen initiatives only about air pollution in the city? No, that is a real misunderstanding. MySense, a collaboration between several local measurement projects, investigates the air quality in agricultural areas. The arrival of a large-scale chicken farm, among other things, is causing the residents a lot of headaches, and stinking sheets as well. This is what inspirer Teus Hagen, internet pioneer and passionate citizen scientist, says.

Suppose your municipality is groaning under the rush hour traffic to and from the big city. As a local government, you look for solutions, but how do you use air quality as a parameter?

Less through traffic, better quality of life. This is ensured by the circulation plan in Ghent. How do you make such a revolution as a city? And does the effect make itself felt in the air quality? We asked Wim Schuddinck of the Mobility Company Ghent.

Since 2018, the residents of Eersel have been measuring fine dust and noise. In the meantime, they are part of a number of regional measurement projects, among other things to map the air pollution and noise nuisance around Eindhoven airport. 'The number of flights has increased sharply in recent years, and with it the nuisance in terms of noise and emissions,' says Cees Beemer, the driving force behind Measuring Together is Knowing in Eersel.

North of Eindhoven, several citizen movements are enthusiastically mapping air pollution. They assemble sensors themselves and work well with the municipal authorities. Piet van Schijndel from Meierijstad and Peter van Heerebeek from Best talk about their joint mission to put air quality on the local agenda for citizens and government.

Visibilis stands for “visibility”. It is the core message of a citizen science project started by André van der Wiel and Dieter Pientka in May 2018. It is about making the invisible particles in the air visible that largely determine the quality of the air.

On May 17, 2019, 30 cyclists literally kicked off to measure the air quality on their bicycles. A measuring box with a sensor on each bicycle maps their route and measures the air quality along the way. In this project, RIVM indicates the real-time collected data. It is difficult to measure air quality accurately with small sensors. That is why RIVM ensures continuous calibration of the sensors, so that the quality and reliability of the data is as good as possible.

The Smart City sensoring project of the municipality of Alkmaar has a Lora network available to everyone. Residents who want to measure in their own living environment can use this network to jointly devise, build and implement their ideas. They receive help from the Junior IOT foundation.

RIVM, in collaboration with the Safety Regions, will investigate the options offered by sensors in the event of fire or other incidents in which a lot of smoke is released.

Sensor.community is one of the largest and fastest growing citizen science communities. Before November 2019, Sensor.Community was known as Luftdaten. This international platform shows all kinds of measurements, for example particulate matter, noise and temperature. You can also find data from different communities.

Clean Air Arnhem is a project of the municipality of Arnhem. The project is being carried out by Natuur en Milieu Gelderland and Luchtwachters Arnhem. The project consists of setting up a citizen monitoring network for particulate matter, workshops on how best to light a wood stove, and a newsletter to inform people about all activities.

In 2020, nineteen volunteers committed themselves to monthly measurements of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) with Palmes tubes. In this way we learn more about air quality in more remote places and on the edges of the Netherlands, where few official measurements are taken.

At the end of December 2020, the Samen Meten Meierijstad (SMM) was founded. Six months later, their monitoring network already consists of more than 115 particulate matter sensor kits. The monitoring network is a good example of local monitoring networks that are popping up more and more in the Netherlands.