London’s Polluted Air
See Air Pollution – Local effects from Global Causes for a round up of regulations, North London’s Air for more on journey types and what Camden and Haringey can do, and Your Car for information on clean cars – particularly Electric models.
Click here for Waking Up to Poisonous Air , showing this Green Party map of local air quality results:
For daily information at London Air Quality Network click here.
For Defra’s daily air forecasts click here.
For daily Air Text Alerts of Air Quality click here or here.
For Real Time Air Quality information for London click here.
For a CleanSpace Mobile App with a personal monitoring tag click here. (Note: the Tag costs £75, but signing up does offer some incentives, and no responsibility is taken by Transition Highgate for this).
For information about Personal Exposure measuring equipment click here.
Also watch out for the Tzoa wearable device that will measure PM10, PM2.5, dust and pollen, UV, temperature, humidity and atmosphere pressure.
To donate to Client Earths legal action against Defra to abide by the Supreme Court’s order to come up with ambitious new measures to meet EU pollution limits click here. “Your donation will help us fight in the courts for your right to breathe clean air.”
Poor Air Quality affects locations all across the world. See the Air Quality Index for any city to find current pollution levels and also the World Health Organisation database for ambient (outdoor) air pollution monitoring from almost 1600 cities in 91 countries.
Common causes, though they vary in different places, include vehicles, aviation, construction and even domestic boilers. Many of these are sans frontier meaning that co-operation, innovation and regulation has to be at Global, Country (or EU) level.
Local Air pollution events:
Tuesday 26th April. The Hampstead Forum joined other groups reporting their local NO2 readings at a public meeting. Forum volunteers had placed NO2 diffusion tubes at 31 locations around Hampstead and discovered that at some locations with heavy traffic, readings were approaching double the legal limit. The other local groups include the Highgate Neighbourhood Forum Campaign for Cleaner Air who are also conducting pollution monitoring and the Camden Green Party.
Speaking:
- Prof. Frank Kelly’s Environmental Research Group at Kings College has led research into the health impacts of London’s air pollution
- Simon Birkett is the founder of the Clean Air London campaign
- Alan Andrews is a member of Client Earth, the legal charity that took the British government to court
- Nicky Gavron is a member of the London Assembly and a campaigner for protecting schoolchildren from air pollution
- Siân Berry is a councillor for Highgate, candidate for Mayor of London, and led the first air pollution study in Dartmouth Park
The meeting was hosted by Castle Debates and was be chaired by environmental lawyer Pamela Castle OBE.
Neighbourhood forums and groups displayed the results of their own air pollution studies. There were also be stalls run by campaigns and organisations working for clean air.
Wednesday 27th April Stop Killing Cyclists had a Transport Pollution Die-In protest at the Department for Transport. It called for “urgent positive action to eliminate transport pollution and to condemn the UK government’s actions which over the last year have deliberately destroyed progress towards reducing the horrific death and disease toll from transport pollution.”
