The Better Air Quality (BAQ) Conference 2026 was held in Bangkok from 11–13 March 2026 by Clean Air Asia in partnership with organizations such as ADB, UNEP, CCAC, and ESCAP. It brought together policymakers, researchers, development institutions, and practitioners to exchange knowledge, showcase solutions, and accelerate action on air quality management across the Asia-Pacific region. Over 850 air quality experts from more than 50 countries participated.
Anchored around the theme “Together for Clear Skies: Driving Action, Accelerating Investment,” BAQ 2026 emphasized moving beyond commitments toward implementation, scaling up financing, and strengthening regional cooperation to address air pollution as both a public health crisis and a climate challenge.
Here is my blog post I wrote after attending this Conference.
Two Ideas, One Uneasy Gap
I returned from the Better Air Quality Conference in Bangkok with a lingering discomfort.
Not because the discussions lacked depth. On the contrary, the conversations were sharper than before. Air pollution is no longer treated merely as an environmental issue. It is now framed as a development issue, an economic issue, even a financing opportunity.
And yet, something felt unresolved.
Two ideas stood out.
The first is the growing acceptance of airshed logic, that air pollution must be understood at a regional, cross-jurisdictional scale.
The second is the positioning of air quality as a gateway to finance, where improvements are justified through measurable health benefits that can be valued economically.
Both ideas are compelling. But they operate on different logics and remain misaligned in their current form.
The Design Problem We Keep Overlooking
Air moves across boundaries. Governance does not. We know this very well now.
Pollution flows across transport corridors, industrial belts, and rural landscapes. Yet authority remains fragmented across municipal bodies, state departments, and sectoral agencies.
Cities are held accountable for outcomes, even though they do not control key emission sources such as power plants, freight movement, industrial fuel choices, or agricultural burning.
This is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of design.
It persists because accountability is politically easier to assign at the city level, even when emissions are not controlled there.
India’s National Clean Air Programme illustrates this tension. It has expanded coverage to over 130 cities and set ambitious reduction targets. Some progress is visible. But overall performance remains uneven, and most cities continue to exceed national ambient air quality standards.
The programme remains city-centric and targets, funding, and accountability are tied to municipalities.
City plans improve visibility and enable incremental action, but they largely manage exposure rather than alter emission trajectories at scale.
The Airshed: Scientifically Sound concept but Institutionally Elusive
Working on the basis of airshed therefore becomes logical. But airshed is not stable; it expands and contracts with seasons, meteorology, and episodic events and are further influenced by climate variability and change.
The concept of an “influence radius” offers a more scientifically defensible way to describe airshed dynamics than treating airsheds as fixed spatial entities. Evidence across geographies shows that this radius varies significantly over time, primarily driven by meteorology. Examples in the Indo-Gangetic Plain and China’s Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei suggest that the influence radius of an airshed is not only variable but can shift by an order of magnitude across seasons, underscoring the need for dynamic, rather than static, representations in air quality management and forecasting frameworks.
While the airshed approach is scientifically robust, it remains institutionally elusive.
Governance requires fixed boundaries, defined accountability, and predictable financing. A moving atmospheric boundary offers none of these.
We are trying to design stable systems around unstable boundaries.
Air Quality as a Gateway to Finance
At the same time, a different narrative is gaining ground.
Air pollution is increasingly being used as a proxy for investment.
Its impacts are visible and immediate. Health burdens, mortality, illness, productivity loss can be translated into economic terms. Global estimates suggest air pollution costs economies up to 5–6% of GDP.
This creates a compelling case for investment.
Globally, this approach has worked. China linked air quality targets with industrial restructuring. The European Union embedded air quality into infrastructure investment.
In each of these cases, financing worked not simply because the economics were compelling, but because institutional authority, regulatory enforcement, and investment flows were aligned within a defined governance structure. Finance works when institutions are aligned, not just when economics is clear. India is beginning this shift.
Recent World Bank Program-for-Results (P4R) financing in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana marks a shift toward state-level, multi-sector action linked to results, with partial recognition of airshed dynamics. We should evaluate these programs carefully as their effectiveness will depend on how institutional coordination and accountability are operationalized across sectors and jurisdictions. Robust evidence linking such instruments to sustained improvements in ambient air quality remains limited as results are often defined as intermediate indicators (e.g. electric vehicles financed) and not true outcomes (e.g. % reduction in PM2.5). Given the dynamics of airsheds, it is difficult to peg the outcomes to absolute reductions.
Where the Two Logics Collide
Airshed logic tells us the problem is regional and fluid.
Financing logic tells us action must be anchored in clear institutions.
One expands the boundary of the problem. The other constrains the boundary of action demanding appropriate institutional architecture.
They are both correct. But they do not fully meet. They operate on different logics of scale and accountability and therefore fail to converge in practice.
The Capability Constraint
There is also a more practical constraint. The capability – especially at the city and State levels.
State and city agencies often lack the capacity to design integrated programs. Sectoral silos persist. Coordination remains weak.
Financial institutions struggle to interpret air quality as an investable domain. There is no standardized framework to translate emission reductions into financial risk metrics or return profiles, making air quality difficult to integrate into lending and investment decisions.
The narrative of investment-ready air quality is advancing faster than the institutional design and capacity required to implement it.
A Question for BAQ 2028
We understand the science better than ever.
We are beginning to understand the economics.
But we have not yet aligned the institutions.
We must ask
- Is a fully airshed-based governance model even feasible, or are we looking at second-best approximations (state-led, partial coordination)?
- how can States play a more active role in reshaping multi-sectoral emissions?
- how cross-state coordination will be enforced for large airsheds like the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP)
- to what extent financing models such as P4R translate into accountability for outcomes, rather than merely funding inputs or intermediate indicators?
- how can air quality be embedded as a financially material risk, performance, and disclosure parameter within infrastructure and corporate financing, such that it directly influences pricing, covenants, and capital allocation decisions, rather than remaining an external co-benefit assessed post facto?
Perhaps BAQ 2028 should move beyond strategies and focus on aligning governance and finance.
But then do we have to wait for BAQ 2028? I suggest we hold a national roundtable to brainstorm as NCAP 2.0 is just getting rolled out.
We are no longer constrained by lack of knowledge. We are constrained by the absence of institutional architecture that matches how air actually behaves.
It is also possible that fully aligning governance with atmospheric behavior may not be entirely achievable within existing institutional structures.
We may have to live with sub-optimal solutions.