‘People may need statistics, but they believe stories’ – attributed to Dan Heath

Do you have a story of how air pollution has impacted you?

A vivid smell? Smog that affected your daily life?

Dust, soot, or poor visibility?

A memory you’ll never forget?

The Air Quality Chronicles project is collecting personal memories of air pollution to build a rich collection of lived experiences.

Air pollution causes over 8 million premature deaths each year, yet public engagement on the topic remains limited. Existing approaches (e.g. data dashboards and visualisations) tend to inform rather than build meaningful connections.

The Air Quality Chronicles project will address this by collecting and analysing anecdotal, historical accounts of air pollution experiences, focusing on the ways pollution affects often mundane aspects of daily life. For example, in the 1940s, Pittsburgh residents checked wind direction before hanging laundry to avoid factory soot; in the late 20th century, pollution limited rainbow formation across much of urban China.

This project develops a new approach to making air quality meaningful across communities and cultures by combining archival and qualitative methods to understand how pollution is noticed, interpreted, and remembered.

We will collect personal accounts of these often simple, but tangible, non-health effects of air pollution. While subjective, these narratives offer valuable insight into how environmental change is perceived, normalised, and embedded in social memory. Contributions will be sought across countries and generations.

The project builds on the Air Quality Stripes (Pringle et al., 2025), which gained widespread media attention.

While the Stripes illustrated how air quality has changed, Air Quality Chronicles establishes a qualitative evidence base of how those changes were experienced in everyday life.

We would love to hear from you, whether it’s a brief memory, a striking story, or a fun fact, your contribution is valuable.

Check out the examples below. If you’d like to share your #AirQualityChronicles, email airqualitystripes@gmail.com