Parents join forces to advocate for clean air

24 September 2021

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Three prominent mothers and clean air advocates have joined forces to gather stories from parents around the world whose children’s health has been affected by air pollution and raise concern about their children’s future.

Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, Bhavreen Kandhari and Patrice Tomcik have launched a website, OurChildrensAir.life, to raise awareness and increase public pressure on governments to take action to tackle air pollution.

The website invites mothers and parents around the world to tell their stories, creating a resource of real-life examples and helping parents think about the health problems they are witnessing in their children and the potential contributing factors.

Ultimately, they hope this will pressure governments to commit to cleaner air by meeting the World Health Organization’s (WHO) air quality guidelines, which will be strengthened for the first time since 2005 on 22 September.

As of 2016, 93% of children worldwide lived in areas where air quality exceeds the WHO’s existing guidelines, and 600,000 per year died from its effects, according to a WHO report in 2018.

Rosamund, Bhavreen and Patrice have all seen the harmful impacts of air pollution on their own children. Rosamund’s nine-year-old daughter Ella died in 2013 from severe asthma linked to air pollution and is the first person in the world to have air pollution listed as a cause of death on her death certificate.

Bhavreen’s twin teenage daughters were born prematurely and already have the lungs of a smoker, while Patrice’s three-year-old son is a leukaemia survivor at greater risk from toxins, including pollution from fracking that occurs near their home in Pennsylvania.