Global Clean Air

2024 has been a significant year for the climate and air pollution crisis, both in terms of the mounting impacts and increased action. Extreme climate events like hurricanes and wildfires devastated communities around the world, forcing the issue to the forefront of public consciousness. Meanwhile countries, companies and communities took some noteworthy actions to track and reduce emissions, including major commitments made at COP28 to cut methane followed by the launch of MethaneSAT and the first UN resolution on clean air.

Climate change and air pollution are dual challenges that severely impact our health and as such must be solved together.

EDF together with the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) and Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) convened cross-sector clean air leaders to discuss how we can take an integrated approach to cutting greenhouse gases and air pollutants to protect human health. Together, we took stock of how far we’ve come, assessed some hard truths and identified the biggest opportunities in front of us to secure meaningful wins. The conversation captured some important learnings in the struggle to accelerate clean air and climate action that help point towards a pathway forward. Here are six takeaways.

1. Investments in data and research are paying off

Dr. Maria Neira, Director of the Public Health, Environment and Social Determinants of Health Department of the World Health Organization, shared how she has been encouraged by a shift in the recent global pollution dialogue away from merely describing the problem and toward building solutions. We know that research and monitoring efforts, some of which EDF has led, have been essential to understanding the source and impacts of pollution and to identifying solutions. The dialogue shift described by Dr. Neira suggests those efforts are starting to pay off as governments and companies are using pollution insights to identify solutions.

2. Cutting emissions takes resources and capacity

Global air pollution mitigation is severely underfunded, a crucial issue explored more below. But Martina Otto, head of UNEP’s CCAC, emphasized that governments need technical assistance as much as funding to help them set-up and maintain air quality monitoring systems that can enable effective enforcement, track clean air actions and identify new pollution sources.

This was echoed by Brazil’s National Secretary of Urban Environment, Adalberto Maluf, who outlined his country’s current efforts to implement air pollution standards including upgrading the national air quality monitoring network. The CCAC’s Clean Air Flagship, launched earlier this year, is a meaningful step toward meeting this need by mobilizing funds and fostering a community of practice where countries can learn from each other and share resources through the Air Quality Management Exchange.

3. We need to get better at tailoring our messaging

During her remarks, Valerie Hickey, Global Director for Environment, Natural Resources and Blue Economy at the World Bank, called for a fresh look at how we communicate about air pollution and its health risks, especially to those most affected. She gave an example of a farmer in Northern India who continues to engage in agricultural burning in full knowledge of the health risks, because he also knows that without it, he couldn’t earn enough to sustain his family.

In a second example, Hickey described a health minister who is told that every $1 she invests in cleaner air returns $9 in health benefits. While the Minister knows this is true in the long term, she has several more urgent needs where the $1 she has can return $2 or $3 right away. Throw in the pressure to deliver before a coming election—what would you do? Making the case for avoided loss doesn’t often move the policy or political decision maker. “We have to find the message that meets the person we’re speaking to,” concluded Hickey.

4. Companies are stepping up to track their emissions and implement reduction plans. More need to follow suit.

Many countries and some companies are developing greenhouse gas inventories to support plans to cut emissions and meet net zero goals. But few have integrated air pollutants into these assessments to address the tradeoffs and synergies. That’s why SEI created a guide to help companies track climate and air pollution emissions across their supply chains and design plans to reduce them. Research Associate in the Air Pollution Group, Eleni Michalopoulou, explained how SEI is partnering with Inter IKEA group, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Alliance for Clean Air, to do just that.

With SEI’s help, IKEA recently established a goal and detailed plan to reduce the company’s climate emissions by 50% by 2030. According to IKEA’s Head of Climate and Air Quality, Sriram Rajagopal, the company is evaluating its entire supply chain, from raw materials to product production, shipping and even end of life disposal. He says IKEA is on track to meet its goal and maybe even exceed it on key air pollutants such as PM2.5, black carbon, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulfur dioxide (SOx).

5. Some countries have already made great strides, and more are stepping up

Angela Churie Kallhauge, EDF’s Executive Vice President for Impact, opened the event by describing the immense progress that the city of Beijing has made on air pollution in recent years, going from smog to blue skies in little more than a decade. This example demonstrates the potential to cut pollution and drastically improve health in a short time frame as we continue to decarbonize. This is a differentiator for clean air action that our community can do a better job to highlight for leaders and funders.

We also learned about how Brazil has been taking significant steps to cut pollution. Sec. Maluf shared how the country recently approved its first ever national air quality program, which will commission a detailed emissions inventory, improve its national monitoring network and tighten air quality standards. EDF is assisting Brazil’s government in this effort by advising on the new standards, developing an integrated approach to managing climate and air pollutants and expanding our Air Tracker tool to its two largest cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

6. Air quality funding isn’t likely to surge any time soon – it’s time to get creative

Jane Burston, CEO of the Clean Air Fund (CAF) brought another dose of reality to the conversation by sharing the results of CAF’s latest State of Global Air Quality Funding Report: Global financing for air quality projects saw a tiny increase in recent years, but remains dismally low at about 1% of global development and 2% of public climate funds. Burston echoed an important point made by Hickey from the World Bank: Air quality is unlikely to see a dramatic funding boost anytime soon, so we must find more creative ways to reallocate or repurpose money that’s already available to maximize benefits for clean air, climate and health. Both speakers shared a few thoughts for how to do this, including repurposing agricultural subsidies, providing seed funding to de-risk private sector investments, and strengthening our case to the philanthropic sector.

What’s next: This conversation brought a grounded optimism to the real progress we can make to tackle the global air pollution crisis. While low funding remains our greatest challenge, our messaging about the scope and urgency of the problem has broken through to countries, communities and increasingly companies around the world. Now it is incumbent upon us to translate what we know into meaningful, tailored stories and to focus on metric-driven solutions that can help redirect existing resources to deliver emissions reductions. By taking these next steps while approaching air pollution and climate change as the interrelated problems that they are, we can deliver tangible health benefits to a more people than ever in the coming critical years.