Environmental and climate data are increasingly central to sustainable urban governance, climate resilience,
public health management, and environmental justice. Yet across Africa, environmental data ecosystems remain fragmented, uneven, and underdeveloped, weakening governments’ and stakeholders’ ability to design evidence-based responses to climate and environmental risks.
Addressing these issues, RIA researchers, Dr Sandra Makumbirofa and Drew Haller, partner with the Local Development Research Institute‘s Leonida Mutuku and Cecilia Mwende Mulu to conduct a comparative analysis of environmental air-quality data value chains in Cape Town, South Africa and Nairobi, Kenya. The resulting policy brief finds that while both cities have expanded air quality monitoring and open-data systems, significant gaps remain between data generation, regulatory enforcement, public accountability, and meaningful civic participation.
These gaps are the result of four significant governance challenges:
- Monitoring infrastructure remains unevenly distributed;
- Data reliability and continuity are undermined by infrastructure failures: load shedding, fragmented monitoring systems, weak maintenance, and inconsistent interoperability standards;
- Transparency mechanisms often fail to translate into substantive accountability or corrective governance action; and
- Citizens remain largely positioned as consumers rather than co-producers of environmental knowledge, limiting participatory governance and environmental justice outcomes.
Examining each city’s standards for data production, processing, consumption, and sharing, researchers provide city-specific policy recommendations to help translate data into action. Among their recommendations, they particularly emphasise the need to move beyond technical monitoring investments toward integrated, participatory, and justice-oriented environmental data governance systems. To do this, both cities need data governance frameworks that can mandate cross-institutional data sharing, ensure data continuity through pipeline and infrastructural maintenance, and embed participatory mechanisms that give communities a formal role in shaping equitable and resilient environmental policy outcomes. Only then can data be used for sustainable planetary outcomes.
