Toxic air and social justice
Unclean bill of health
On Tuesday, Louise got almost the last seat in a packed event in Parliament about Toxic Air and Social Justice: The Unequal Burden of Air Pollution. Readers will know we have covered air inequality a lot but this was the first time we’d been part of such a significant event focusing on it. Many speakers commented on the scale, energy and diversity of the audience, making it feel different to many other environmental policy events.
Notably (indeed, commented on by Love Ssega himself) the panel was entirely female -marking quite a break from the oil paintings of men that they sat beneath. The amazing speakers were: Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, Sian Berry MP, Baroness Jenny Jones, Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP, Anna Garrod and L’myah Sherae. Between them they represented the Green Party, Labour Party, Ella Roberta Foundation, Impact on Urban Health and EnactEquality. Hiding in the audience were other air quality luminaries including Stephen Holgate, Andrew Grieve and Simon Birkett.
How to summarise the 90 minutes of insights?
a key rallying call that minoritised and racialised communities suffer higher pollution than richer groups (statistics varied but by anything from 16 to 35% worse)
shining a spotlight on the car industry (with electric vehicles not being a solution) as well as construction, waste incinerators, freight and wood burning
air quality targets are not currently tight enough - it’s about health, children, and ultimately the human right to clean air
the current government came under some criticism for not prioritising air quality (in contrast to the progress in the EU) and indeed taking decisions that could undermine it including the third runway at Heathrow
high prevalence of asthma including in underrepresented groups and amongst children (1.1 million in the UK)
bus fares need to come down and more policies like school streets and ULEZ enacted (although there was a debate on the panel about the value of low traffic neighbourhoods)
what can you do? Email your MP; support Ella’s Law to get onto the statute books.
A nice summary from one of the panellists: you need ripples (eg better data), waves (eg funding cargo bikes for local businesses) and tidal waves (eg new laws and major campaigns).
Think global, act local
All this takes us to the inequality of air pollution on a global level. There is a good explainer here, including the extra impacts borne by people in the riskiest jobs as well as the role of pollution from cooking. For Black History Month we spotted this excellent write up of Kieshaun White campaigning for environmental justice in Fresno, California.
Meanwhile in Brixton, our node is showing breaches of daily nitrogen dioxide levels almost every day, and some alarming spikes in particulate matter, especially at weekends. Given the need to raise awareness locally, we were excited to see some of our work recognised in the latest Brixton Bugle!
The big survey
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