Air is Kin

This first stage will be creating a "protocol study", where we will publish data gathering methods that will be scientifically reviewed, so communities can have access to free and scientifically reviewed data gathering methods for their own advocacy.

The study will be survey based and is expected to be taken weekly. The main focus of the survey will be the tracking of symptoms as markers of community health. This is to track how air pollution is affecting people’s health on a day-to-day basis. Finally, the survey will have open-ended questions to provide an opportunity to detail nuanced changes in their life, such changes to their habits, community interactions, and overall well being.

Based on this research, we have identified the following needs and knowledge gaps within the space of environmental justice and clean air advocacy;

• The majority of the justice is centred around lawsuits which financially compensate communities affected, however the communities are still left with the poor health outcomes. Therefore, there is a need to look beyond lawsuits and into health reparations, health justice, and legal mechanisms for pollution prevention. What this looks like should be community specific, here are some examples:

  • Actions that prevent pollution to avoid adverse health impacts

  • Health centres that specialise in air pollution effects

  • Specialised research centres that look at healing techniques for those affected by air pollution.

  • Community led educational learning programmes on data, effects of air pollution, and key vocabulary related to clean air policies.

• The centring of lawsuits rather than health justice, means that many communities continue to live within proximity of industrial sites. Where they experience disproportionate levels of cardiovascular, respiratory, and educational disorders, as well as cancers, while lacking mechanisms to prevent pollution.

• Whilst there is a lot of information on how air pollution creates disease, we are missing information on how air pollution reduces quality of life on a day-to-day basis. This includes identifying symptoms such as headaches, nausea, fatigue, nose bleeds which can reduce a person’s quality of life. Preventing them from engaging with family, friends and community, requiring more sick days which can affect household income, and generally feeling like home is a place of stress.

  • Symptoms are not the only way that the lived experience is affected. We must also consider how people are affected by not being able to go outside, feeling unsafe in their home, worrying about the health of their loved ones, experiencing ecological death and changes to places that are ancestral, feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness.

  • We must also consider that experiencing injustice can also face a mental burden as it is an added stressor.

• Currently in the UK the focus on clean air has been at the individual level (car use, type of car, cookers, and heating devices), this has erased the responsibility of industrial polluters;

  • There are multiple top-down factors that contribute to individual choices, such as income, housing quality, living near roads vs green areas, owning or affording a flat, proximity to resources, and policies. Therefore, only focusing on individual choices creates more health and environmental inequities.

  • This project will therefore focus on industrial polluters, who are systemically creating environmental and health injustices.

• Whilst there are great air pollution monitoring devices that are free and available to communities, there is still a need for more robust infrastructure at a community level. This is to prevent communities being gaslit, contributing to the momentum of environmental and health justice, and preventing industrial polluters from lying about the effects of air pollution.

  • Data literacy

  • Data collection methods that are cheap to free and backed up by science

  • Science and community collaborations to create justice based data analysis.

  • Community driven policy infrastructure

  • Environmental justice literacy to enable

  • Community-led studies

• A better definition of sacrifice zones, as the current one is quite ambiguous and therefore not useful to communities advocating for clean air.

• A better understanding and definition of health.

The Air is Kin Academy is being developed.

Core team researchers are working together to achieve ethics approval from University College London to support the protocol study.

If you are a community living near a site of acute air pollution and want to join a research programme to help your advocacy work, please message aik@thecentriclab.com.

We are looking to partner with more GPs in urban areas to help their abilities to track and make not of illnesses and symptoms related to air pollution.