Imagine a world where everyone on earth can breathe healthy air. Today, just 1 in 10 people in the world breathe healthy air, according to the World Health Organization. Together, we can stop air pollution and simultaneously help reduce the impacts of climate change.

GlobalCleanAir.org is a platform for everyone in the world to share and learn best practices on reducing outdoor air pollution. Whether you are a public health or air quality professional, community leader, elected official, corporate sustainability executive, environmental advocate or academic researcher, we pledge to offer you regular updates to help become a powerful force of change.

Global Cities Taking Leadership Role

Nearly 40 large cities around the world are signatories to C40’s Clean Air Cities Declaration. These cities pledged to implement new policies and regulations to achieve ambitious reductions in air pollution.

Examples of solutions include: “rapidly expanding zero emission transport, creating low or zero emission areas, supporting walking/cycling, vehicle restrictions or financial incentives/disincentives, reducing non-road machinery and city owned vehicle emissions, clean construction sites and equipment, reducing industrial emissions, reducing wood burning, expanding affordable access to clean energy for cooking and restricting pollution from solid waste burning and expanded greening.”

Seventy cites, regions and countries committed to the UN’s Breathe Life 2030 campaign. They campaign shares best practices and demonstration of progress to meet WHO air quality targets by 2030.

Citizen Advocacy in USA

In the USA, Moms are mobilizing and advocating for their children – the next generation. Moms are calling for serious and comprehensive action on climate change, clean air, and toxic chemicals.

To get the message across, Clean Air Moms Action is doing both grassroots activities like organizing volunteers to talk to members of Congress, as well as running ad campaigns to draw attention to the need to move the United States to a 100% clean economy by 2050 so we produce no more climate pollution than we can remove. This means overhauling our entire energy infrastructure, from transportation and manufacturing, to our electric utility sector.

Clean Air Moms Action is advocating for 100% Clean Future, to protect our planet for generations to come. Visit https://cleanairmomsaction.org/.

Making the Invisible Visible: A guide for mapping hyperlocal air pollution to drive clean air action offers information and best practices that can help leaders better understand their city’s quality challenges, how neighborhood-level monitoring can help illuminate them and how to develop a plan to significantly reduce pollution.

Combine Data, Policy and Education

Some cities, for example, charge drivers to bring cars into urban centers. London’s hallmark Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) charges older, more polluting vehicles to enter the city center. EDF’s analysis of Breathe London data found that the introduction of the ULEZ coincided with a significant drop in NO₂ pollution, particularly at monitoring sites inside the zone near roads.

Other approaches include social marketing campaigns that galvanize campaigners to draw attention to air pollution through education about mass transit or vehicle maintenance.

Better data can help improve all of these approaches to improving air quality by showing local leaders, activists and residents not only where pollution is at its worst but also how effective individual policy solutions are at reducing it once they are underway.

EDF is developing policy models and decision-making tools for reducing air pollution and its impacts on health and the environment from stationary sources, transportation, land use and urban development, with a strong emphasis on equity.