1,1,1,2,3,3,4,1,3,- 1University of Birmingham, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Birmingham, United Kingdom (f.pope@bham.ac.uk)
- 2University of Birmingham, Department of Applied Health Sciences, Birmingham, United Kingdom
- 3AirQo, Department of Computer Science, College of Computing and Information Sciences, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.
- 4Institute for Sustainability Leadership, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1GG, United Kingdom
Traffic is a dominant source of urban air pollution in many low- and middle-income countries, where ageing vehicle fleets, high traffic volumes, and the resuspension of dust from paved and unpaved roads combine to degrade air quality and threaten public health. Yet the relative contributions of exhaust and non-exhaust traffic-related emissions to the total air pollution remain poorly quantified.
In partnership with the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution (GAHP), we deployed a network of low-cost air quality sensors across Kampala, Uganda, measuring particulate matter mass and size resolved number concentrations, NOx, and total volatile organic compounds (TVOCs), to complement the existing AirQo monitoring network (Sserunjogi et al., 2022). The objective was to characterise spatial variability in air pollution across the city centre and suburban areas and to quantify the contribution of transport-related sources.
Low-Cost Source Apportionment (LoCoSA) methods (Bousiotis et al., 2025) were applied to the sensor data to identify the dominant contributors to PM2.5 at multiple sites. Depending on proximity to major roads, direct traffic emissions accounted for 18–35% of total PM2.5. Resuspended dust, strongly influenced by vehicle activity, was the largest single source, contributing more than 50% at all locations. These results indicate that a substantial fraction of PM2.5 in Kampala is either directly or indirectly linked to traffic, amplifying the overall impact of transport on urban air quality.
The source-apportionment results are being integrated into a simplified version of the University of Birmingham’s air-quality life-course assessment tool (AQ-LAT; Hall et al., 2024) to quantify source-specific health impacts and attributable mortality. This low-cost, scalable framework enables cities in resource-limited settings to estimate the public-health benefits of targeted emission-control strategies, supporting evidence-based and cost-effective air-quality management.
This presentation demonstrates how the combination of low-cost sensing, low-cost source apportionment, and health-impact assessment can be used to quantify the contribution of traffic to air pollution and associated health burdens. The approach is scalable and transferable to cities worldwide.
References
Sserunjogi et al., (2022). Seeing the air in detail: Hyperlocal air quality dataset collected from spatially distributed AirQo network. Data in brief, 44, p.108512. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2022.108512
Bousiotis et al., (2025). Low-Cost Source Apportionment (LoCoSA) of air pollution-literature review of the state of the art. Science of The Total Environment, 998, p.180257. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2025.180257
Hall et al., (2024). Regional impact assessment of air quality improvement: The air quality lifecourse assessment tool (AQ-LAT) for the West Midlands combined authority (WMCA) area. Environmental Pollution. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2024.123871
How to cite: Pope, F., Bousiotis, D., Singh, A., Okure, D., Okello, G., Sanghera, D., Bartington, S., Hall, J., Okedi, D., Sserunjogi, R., and Bainomugisha, E.: Assessing the effect of traffic on air quality and public health in Kampala, Uganda using low-cost approaches, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-14688, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-14688, 2026.
