Breathing communication
Talk of the town
Last week Louise attended the Communicating Air Quality conference, on which we gave a sneak preview here. The organisers told us they wanted this to be something different, to get people to think and feel differently - and this certainly worked.
Friend of this blog, Agnes Agyepong kicked off with her keynote, reminding the conference that data and science is not enough if it doesn’t impact people’s lives. Experiencing doctors not listening to her with a severely asthmatic child until it became a medical emergency, her phrase “I am the scientist of my own life” rang through the conference. She also reminded attendees that “communities are custodians of their own data”, talking about the epistemic injustice of who gets to access and use knowledge.
Dr Gary Fuller, who writes a regular column in the Guardian newspaper, questioned whether the challenge for communicating on air pollution is that it is invisible - or rather that its impacts are hiding in plain sight, with deaths and ill health caused by its corrosive impact over time. He challenged that we are tackling this use of “air as a waste disposal unit” at too small a level, looking at what is feasible to address rather than what we should address given the enormity of the problem. To do this, and get over the politicisation of the issue that has now taken hold, we need to paint a positive vision of biodiverse cities, active travel and the freedom of raising children who are not chronically ill.
So many more gems through the day, it is hard to summarise:
Dr Maria Neira, World Health Organisation Director covering air pollution, said we have never had more information and the health impacts - we now need to think creatively about brand, influencers and key words to land messages
Dr Nerea Calvillo, architect and academic, talked about the politics of data, how it needs to be mediated effectively and how sometimes you do need to use its complexity, which is where story-telling can help
Love Ssega, musician and artist, covered how to make the air pollution story relevant for young people, talking about futures, using strong colours, engaging athletes and celebrities (he mentioned Billie Eilish, with whom he had worked)
Dr Heather Price, who has interviewed Sacha for her latest research, encouraged us to walk in other peoples’ shoes and showed a memorable ‘green’ map of air pollution levels in Scotland, making everyone think there was no problem
Akshay Joshi, from Indian environmental data company Ambee, talked about getting granular street to street data from monitors on rickshaws, leading to their international work on clean air routing
and many more amazing contributions, including from the audience - posts from Kayla, Marina and Claudia give more.
Attendees got to record their thoughts in a “confessional booth”. Louise’s mind had been taken to some of the overlaps with the world of start ups - so, as the conference was about making new connections, she recorded a bit of a ramble connecting the discussion to some Silicon Valley theology. “To scale, do things that don’t scale” (attributed to Paul Graham but made famous by the likes of AirBnB) - meaning find someone with a deep “pain point” and build something they really love before scaling it up. And that a customer coming to you with a complaint is gold dust - they care enough about what you are doing to take their time but they are bringing new insights to the table. A good reminder in the world of air pollution not just to '“preach to the converted”. Let’s see if the ramble made any sense after the dust settles on the conference!
Back at the nerve centre
Serendipity had it that two of the themes of the conference were picked up in our Air Aware Labs work this week. We had the second of our blogs with the World Economic Forum published. This brought together positive stories of tacking air pollution, in the run up to the WHO Second Conference on Air Pollution and health, which kicks off next week in Colombia. And we had an article and video published by the running influencer DLake, based in Australia, on how he is using AirTrack to help his performance and health. Please check them out!