https://www.livemint.com/news/world/lessons-from-london-pollution-revolution-11571062442464.html
TS Eliot wrote “April is the cruellest month” but for Delhi and most of North India it’s November that qualifies. That’s when air pollution spikes dramatically higher, from the year-round hazardous to nigh-fatal, with almost every year surpassing previous lows for the worst ever recorded. Last year, post-Diwali toxic smog moved city chief minister Arvind Kejriwal to tweet, “Delhi has become a gas chamber” as the air quality index spiked to nearly 1000 (below 50 is considered safe, and anything over 300 is dangerous), which was then roughly ten times worse than Beijing. This year it’s still only October, but he’s already announced strict restrictions on the use of private cars, massive distribution of free face masks, and 1000 new electric buses for the public transport network. Kejriwal’s urgent actions in the nation’s capital are commendable, but the problem extends across the region. According to AirVisual, the leading and most trusted source of international air quality data, India is home to 20 of the world’s 25 worst polluted cities in the world (as measured by levels of highly dangerous PM 2.5 particles which embed deep in the lungs) while Faisalabad and Lahore in Pakistan are also in the bottom 10. If you add in Dhaka in Bangladesh (# 17) that means only two cities outside the subcontinent (Hotan and Kashgar in China) register in this dismal litany of failure. There’s especially cruel irony to see the heavily touted standard-bearer of India’s global competitiveness, Gurugram (aka Guragaon) in Haryana red-lined as the single worst polluted city on the planet. Yet it is undeniable, as we have learned in Delhi with some of Kejriwal’s moves making headway, even these abysmal scenarios can shift and change towards improvement. The shining example for India is right across the border in China, where stringent but easily replicable measures have produced impressive results in a host of cities, most notably in the country’s paired with comprehensive legal standards and strict environmental law enforcement has propelled the city entirely out of AirVisual’s list of the 100 most polluted in the world (it’s currently at 122). The United Nations Environment Programme’s chief scientist says, “Beijing’s efforts, achievements, experiences and lessons in air pollution control over the last twenty years are worth analyzing and sharing in order to progress global environmental governance.” Even given China’s rapid advancements, the somewhat unexpected standout leader of international urban sustainable development efforts has emerged all the way on the other side of the globe. This is London, under Mayor Sadiq Khan (he was elected in 2016), who has derided his city’s “filthy, toxic air” as “a public health emergency.” With great tactical effectiveness, he has positioned the problem in a social justice framework, saying “children living and studying in pollution hotspots, which are often located in the poorest parts of our city, are growing up with underdeveloped and stunted lungs. This isn't just unacceptable, it's shameful.” This provides rationale for “the most ambitious plans to tackle air pollution of any big city in the world.” Khan speaks from the heart about inequality, because he has made it into the elite echelons of British politics via an almost inconceivably hard route. The fifth of eight children born into a working-class immigrant family in South London (his father was a bus-driver, and his mother a seamstress) grew up in a cramped council flat, and lacks anything resembling a natural constituency. Now the first-ever Muslim mayor of a major city in the West serves as both beacon and lightning-rod. A few months ago, President Donald Trump famously tweeted a series of extraordinary personal insults his way, “Sadiq Khan, who by all accounts has done a terrible job as Mayor of London…is a stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me….Kahn [sic] reminds me very much of our very dumb and incompetent Mayor of NYC, de Blasio, who has also done a terrible job - only half his height.” Soon after taking office, Khan (whose grand-parents had migrated from Lucknow in UP to Pakistan following Partition) reached out to Shirley Rodrigues (who was born into a Goan family in Nairobi) to serve as his Deputy Mayor for Environment and Energy, and tasked this veteran of environmental policy-making with tackling London’s air pollution problems. Her new boss said at the time, “Shirley will drive forward the urgent action needed to ensure Londoners no longer have to fear the air we breathe, and will address the failure to tackle the problem by the previous mayor and government…[she] is the perfect person to deliver my agenda.” Then the duo moved dramatically quickly. In just a few months it was amply clear to the world these two policymakers with roots in Pakistan and India were now the global vanguard in combating the effects of pollution in cities. By the time this fact became popularly known, I had already become fascinated by what Rodrigues and Khan were managing to achieve, watching along with great interest from my own urban vantage in the tiny, but increasingly troubled and deteriorating, capital city of India’s smallest state. My home town Panjim has no heavy industry, and is gloriously situated along the shoreline where the Mandovi river meets the Arabian Sea. Stiff ocean breezes ruffle our curtains all day long. Yet, despite all this, air pollution has steadily worsened to seriously worrisome. All through the winter months last year, PM 2.5 levels remained significantly higher than what is normally considered safe. All around me, there’s a rapidly burgeoning epidemic of respiratory problems (which plague all three of my sons). So it’s not just North India, the country’s urban blight has now reached as far as my idyll on the Konkan coast. Even as I watched the quality of life in my neighbourhood nosedive, Rodrigues and Khan began to turn London around with bold innovations that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago. I followed closely, and eventually found myself reaching out to the Deputy Mayor via her Twitter account, to ask if she would consent to being interviewed about London’s anti-pollution agenda. Shirley Rodrigues’s office is evidently overwhelmingly busy, because it took several months for responses to emailed questions to reach my desktop (at one point, lasting weeks, I was told by her press office they were “being looked at by the final sign off director”). Nonetheless, I finally got to learn more about the most ambitious green agenda of any major world city, embedded with many lessons for the rest of us. Rodrigues wrote, “London’s environment plays a vital role in making the city so attractive to visit, live, and work in. Our air, water and green spaces are precious, but they need our help to ensure they are protected, improved and continue to deliver the greatest possible benefits for Londoners. In May 2018 we published the city’s first ever integrated Environment Strategy, aiming to make London greener, cleaner and ready for the future. We’ve taken an integrated approach - tackling environmental issues together, to ensure that our policies support each other – like making sure that policies to reduce the use of diesel cars to cut air pollution don’t lead to a switch back to petrol cars which contribute towards climate change. We’ve also drawn strong links between environment, health, social, fairness and economic agendas. We have set a very ambitious vision for 2050 with detailed plans, policies and pathways for the near and medium term, including making London zero carbon, zero waste and with a zero emission transport network.” The Deputy Mayor pointed to the remarkable success of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), which in April became the world’s first 24-hour, 365-days-a-year pollution charge, imposing a hefty daily fee on cars which emit more than 75g/km of carbon dioxide. Now, 35% fewer such vehicles show up on city streets, and the city has earned 55 million pounds to reinvest in its transportation network. Rodrigues told me, “the Mayor has committed to extend the ULEZ to inner London, up to the North and South circulars in October 2021, and to tighten standards for heavy vehicles in the London-wide Low Emission Zone in October 2020. We will also keep cleaning up London’s transport system and phasing out fossil fuels, including diesel, making the whole bus fleet zero emission by 2037. By October 2020 every bus in London - all 9,000 - will meet or exceed the ULEZ standards – an unprecedented transformation to make London’s famous red buses go green.” Rodrigues was unequivocally clear about what our collective priorities must be, “Environmental threats are real and present, and cities must be prepared for them - it’s an issue of social and environmental justice. Air pollution is an international health emergency that needs to be urgently tackled. There is a huge economic cost (£3.7bn in London alone) [but] bold action on addressing our environmental challenges is paying off. New research shows how London’s strength as a global climate hub is growing, despite the challenges of Brexit uncertainty. Total sales of Low Carbon Goods and Environmental Services have grown from £20.9bn to £39.7bn over the last decade, a total increase of 90 per cent, with a 20 per cent increase between 2015/16 and 2017/18 alone. Meanwhile, the number of people working in the sector in London has grown from 155,953 to 246,073 over the same period, an increase of 58 per cent.” These are the kinds of numbers promised by the newest generation of American politicians led by 29-year-old phenomenon, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who promises a “Green New Deal” phasing out fossil fuels while overhauling the nation’s infrastructure. But while this idealistic cohort is still finding its feet and facing down virulent opposition in Washington, the exact same logic is being translated into real world policy initiatives in London, which is drawing the rapt attention of every urban planner and city administrator on the planet. Rodrigues told me she and Khan take this responsibility seriously, “we know that as a major global city, others look to London to lead and be a source of inspiration on how to tackle environmental challenges. But we are also keen to learn. The Mayor often says he is happy to steal others’ good ideas! To support this, we regularly share good practices and examples of cutting-edge solutions from London so others can follow our lead and learn from our successes.” How can it be that two grand-children of the subcontinent can forge so spectacularly ahead in creating workable and functioning solutions to the precise problems dragging down the cities in their ancestral homelands into unimaginable depths? How is it that pollution barely registers as an election issue, anywhere across the entire swathe of South Asia? Here, the coda to the great architect and urban planner Charles Correa’s landmark essay ‘Great City…Terrible Place’ rings unerringly like prophecy. “If you drop a frog into a saucepan of very hot water, it will desperately try to hop out. But if you place a frog in tepid water and then gradually, very very gradually, raise the temperature, the frog will swim around happily adjusting to the increasingly dangerous conditions. In fact, just before the end, just before the frog cooks to death, when the water is exceedingly hot, the frog relaxes, and a state of euphoria sets in. Maybe that is what is happening to us. (note: the #MintLongStory is very slightly edited on the page)
