Greening Governance Seminar Series: Fighting for Blue Skies - Insights from Air Pollution Activists

In cities around the world, air pollution is reaching crisis levels. Breathing in New Delhi’s smog now carries the same health risks as smoking 44 cigarettes; toxic air continues to shutdown schools across Iran’s capital; and this past winter, dangerously high pollution levels across China forced 28 industrial cities to cut steel production in half. These cities aren’t alone. Globally, air pollution is responsible for one in nine deaths each year, making it the world’s top environmental health risk.

But momentum to tackle air quality challenges is growing, and in many countries, community leaders, local activists and civil society organizations are at the forefront of these changes. They are tackling persistent challenges — developing open-source air pollution data platforms to close information gaps, raising public awareness to mobilize support for long-term air quality management policies and taking legal action against governments and companies to hold them accountable to national standards.

Join air pollution leaders and activists from around the world for a conversation on air quality, socio-environmental impacts of rising pollution and governance challenges at the heart of the global crisis. Speakers will showcase innovative solutions from their communities and highlight steps that everyone — private sector executives, government policymakers and local communities — can take to clean up the air we breathe.

Register here.

Speakers

Chris Hasenkopf, Chief Executive Officer, OpenAQ 

Ritwick Dutta, Environmental Lawyer and Managing Trustee, Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment

Timothy Lloyd, Attorney, Centre for Environmental Rights

Ugo Taddei, Lawyer and Clean Air Project Leader, ClientEarth

Carlos Gonzalez Penilla, Executive Director, MAKAIA

Kate Logan, Green Choice Outreach Director, Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs

Moderated by: Jessica Seddon, Director of Integrated Urban Strategy, Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, World Resources Institute