This week Louise took part in a panel discussion at the Climate Tech conference. And an eminent panel it was too: Shirley Rodrigues, Deputy Mayor of London; Professor Ben Barrett, Imperial College London; David Lu, CEO and founder of Clarity Movement Co (who produce the Breathe London monitoring nodes); Priya Shankar, Bloomberg Philanthropies (who fund the Breathe London community programme); and Matt Whitney of the Clean Air Fund… and Louise from Brixton!
This panel set out why Breathe London is such a success: with over 400 nodes installed, connecting the reference nodes (those that are used to report on official targets) with those that community groups and private organisations can install, knowing they are backed by the best expertise and produce reliable data. Data was a strong theme and our visualisations were welcomed. Drawing in communities helps to democratise the issue and involve the people it most affects. A relatable challenge across the programme was actually fixing nodes to lamp-posts - harder than you’d think! We were also excited to hear about plans to extend Breathe London to an international Breathe Cities, using London’s experience in 10 global cities.
We've been thinking a lot about the connection between climate action and tackling air pollution. For the most part, the aims and actions are aligned. There are a set of seminal studies (1, 2, 3, 4) from a few years ago that demonstrate the health benefits (leading to economic gains) that climate mitigation efforts which also target air pollution will achieve. However, there are some areas that are more contentious - when Louise arrived at the conference, the first thing she saw was some rather fancy electric vehicles (no panel beaters required). First thought: am I in the right place? EVs are an important part of de-carbonising transport, yet still have air quality impacts, as we covered here. And there are incentives to tackle climate change (rightly) that don’t always translate through to work on air quality - for example Clean Air Fund’s latest report found that international work on air quality and climate change was not adequately linked.
Purly queens
Louise has had a fun week on the air quality scene! We’ve featured the work of the Knitting the Air group before. Tonight they had their launch of their exhibition in Poplar, E14. This was both a beautiful and terrifying experience. The knitting is delicate and thoughtfully presented; but it shows the local air (near a primary school and another near a main road) as being above WHO limits most of the time. We hope to delve into this more in a future blog.
Update on the node
We’ve finally had the go ahead to install the monitoring node! It will be in the grounds of St Matthews, which, for those who know Brixton, is right opposite Windrush Square. It’s at the intersection of some major roads - so it’s amazing that there is no monitoring there to date. We hope to be able to give you some pictorial evidence soon of the node installation - and then all the data!
Great that Louise was on the panel
I was at the event but as I hadn't paid so I wasn't able to attend the discussion.
So I had a good chat with the one of the guys on the monitors stall.
Issues we chatted about were: difficulties in getting nodes installed, lack of help for people to understand what to do with the data and go beyond trying to solve the issue at their location without considering the bigger picture, reluctance of councils to use and report on Breathe data, council reporting against UK guidelines not WHO ones. And critically - what happens when the contract with Imperial using these monitors ends (which is soon) - changing hardware and support would potentially delay, disrupt and discourage community involvement. We need to see how we can ensure that the network continues but improves - same hardware, growing community, much more support for interpreting data that doesnt rely on a few volunteers.
At the event I saw very few people being excited by the 3 Teslas, there was a number of stalls addressing carbon offsetting and measuring carbon footprint using software. Not many stalls on solutions to reducing emissions - but those there were about distibuted/local solutions. And a few stalls looking for people to become members of environmental groups - I joined Fauna and Flora a 120 year old organisation who do animal conservation work around the world