Saturday is international Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies. It’s only five years old - the UK beat the UN to it by a couple of years with our June Clean Air Day. The focus of this year’s international day is on investment and partnerships.
Also in its fifth year, the Clean Air Fund report on the State of Global Air Quality Funding found that still only 1% of development funding goes to clean air, despite the return on investment being estimated at 30:1. Even within climate investments, there is a failure to achieve air quality benefits. On the more positive, but still slightly ridiculous, note: this is the first year that funding for air quality has overtaken support for fossil fuel projects.
Picking up the investment theme, ShareAction has a report and campaign on the case for investor action on air quality. We usually refer to the cost of air pollution to the global economy as being $3 trillion, but this report actually states is as a whopping $8 trillion. Most of this is due to the impact on worker productivity.
Invest and partner
As for partnerships, there is many a coalition or alliance out there. Internationally, the main groups we are aware of are:
the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, convened by the UN Environment Programme. Unsurprisingly, this is focused on the links between climate change and air pollution. It’s pretty active with region-specific groups and lots of initiatives including a new air quality management platform;
the Alliance for Clean Air is a group of 20 private sector companies brought together under the World Economic Forum. While laudable, it seems less active than it could be, with a handful of those companies showing real leadership;
Our Common Air is the newest on the block, launched last December and chaired by luminaries Helen Clark and Soumya Swaminathan. We haven’t seen a lot of activity - they have a call to action focused on valuing clean air as an asset. We hope to see more soon;
C40 Cities has worked on air pollution for many years. This brings together mayors of (now more than) 40 major global cities. Given many of the actions on clean air belongs at city level, this makes a lot of sense;
their latest initiative, alongside Clean Air Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies, is Breathe Cities. Taking inspiration from our very own Breathe London, this includes 11 cities that are accelerating action on clean air. They also launched an It’s In the Air campaign just before the Paris Olympics.
Towards Clean Air
So why are we ‘noticing the days hurrying by*’? Well, we’ve got our own build up to DCABS (as we’re now calling it) going on. On Saturday, we’ll be launching the latest enhanced features on our AirTrack product. This marks a big milestone for us! We are offering discount codes to our loyal users - please email hello@airawarelabs.com by Saturday if you would like one!
*Line from ‘Blue Skies’ - hope you spotted that!