Air pollution gets personal
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can a greater understanding of how poor air quality harms us, enable us to tackle this urgent problem?
Jane Wakefield meets British artist Michael Pinsky and explores an interactive art instillation mimicking the air of five parts of the world. She hears from Romain Lacombe of the personal pollution sensor company Plume Labs how tracking the air around you can help to design better policies at a city level. Plus Robert Muggah of the Igarape Institute talks through how his interactive maps tracking global pollution can be used by policymakers and city mayors.
(Picture: Woman wearing face mask because of air pollution in the city; Credit: Jun/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pollution. If you're one of the world's urban dwellers, it's likely to be part of your everyday life. |
| 0:08.0 | I'm Jane Wakefield, and on today's Business Daily here on the BBC World Service, |
| 0:12.6 | I'm taking a walk through some of the world's most polluted cities. |
| 0:16.9 | It's getting warmer. It's getting warmer. |
| 0:19.7 | This is humid. This is very difficult to see. This is not particularly pleasant. We're in New Delhi. |
| 0:27.7 | And I'm asking how cities will cope as they expand so rapidly. |
| 0:32.0 | There are 40,000 people who die every year in the UK, at least indirectly from air pollution. |
| 0:38.1 | Over 7 million people, according to the World Health Organization in the world. |
| 0:41.8 | 9,000 of those 40,000 deaths are in London. |
| 0:45.1 | Business Daily on the BBC. |
| 0:51.3 | Recently, I attended the TED conference in Vancouver, |
| 0:54.0 | an annual gathering of some of the best known names in technology and business. |
| 0:58.7 | Vancouver's air might feel fresh. It's a city flanked by mountains and sea. |
| 1:03.3 | But as I headed down to the basement of the TED conference, there was a sudden stench of pollution. |
| 1:08.5 | British artist Michael Pinsky has created an interactive art installation, |
| 1:13.6 | mimicking the air of five parts of the world. |
| 1:16.3 | As we walk from the clear freshness of Arctic Norway to London, |
| 1:20.2 | Sao Paulo, Beijing and Delhi, they all have distinctive sense, as Michael explains. |
| 1:26.5 | So this is a project that I started off in Norway, |
| 1:29.9 | where I worked with environmental psychologists |
| 1:32.2 | who are looking at whether artwork can change people's perception of climate change. |
| 1:38.2 | People don't change their behaviour unless something impacts on their everyday life. |
... |
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