# Why Local Skies Matter More Than Ever

Stand on any city street at rush hour. The haze isn’t just traffic—it’s a warning. According to the World Health Organization, 99% of the global population is breathing air that exceeds safe pollution levels. That includes you, me, and nearly everyone we know.

Meanwhile, 2023 was declared the hottest year ever recorded, edging us closer to climate tipping points scientists have warned about for decades. Droughts, floods, and wildfires are becoming seasonal headlines. But for all the urgency, we still lack one basic tool: high-resolution, real-time, people-centered environmental data.

Traditional weather and air quality monitoring networks are patchy. Most rely on government stations that are expensive, fixed, and too few to show what’s happening at the neighborhood level. According to IQAir, over 6,000 cities still have no official air quality sensors at all. This means millions live in environmental blind spots—unknowingly exposed, unable to act, and uncounted in policymaking.

And yet, in your pocket right now is a powerful sensor. Your phone. Across the world, nearly 7 billion people carry one. If each of us could share what we see, feel, and breathe—snapshots of skies, smells of smoke, moments of sun or rain—we could create something that no satellite or government station alone ever could: a living, breathing map of Earth’s condition in real-time.\\

EcoPulse is born from that idea.

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