The Clean Air Fund partners with organisations that promote air quality data and action across the world, influencing and supporting policymakers. Tom Grylls leads on work relating to super pollutants, and is currently championing efforts to tackle two of the most deadly types of emission – both responsible for fuelling climate change while causing irreparable damage to our lungs.
How did you first become involved in air quality and air pollution?
I initially studied mechanical engineering at the University of Bristol. To be honest, I wasn’t completely sure what I wanted to study. I was broadly interested in understanding how maths and physics can be applied to real world systems and problems, and that gave me quite a broad overview, from computer science to renewable energy to design.
Coming out of that, I still had a bit of an itch to kind of dig deeper into one of those subjects. I felt like I had a broad overview. And, having grown up in East London, the city had changed – the part of the city where I live had changed so much over that period – so I specifically wanted to apply some of what I’d learned through mechanical engineering into how humans and urban form interact.
Coming out of my PhD I wanted to do something that was a bit closer to policy change, and I felt that the research area I got myself into was really interesting, really important, but quite far removed, ultimately, from the kind of decision-making side. So that was when I joined Clean Air Fund, and it has given me this bridge between applying my technical knowledge to an organization that’s developing strategies and trying to build the field and drive change using philanthropic funding.
My PhD, at Imperial College, focused on the urban form and in particular how blue and green infrastructure – parks, lakes and rivers – interact with your experience of the city. Then as soon as I understood that the model I was working on could capture the particles and gasses that humans are pumping out in a city and changing the air that we’re breathing, I dived into that. My PhD ended up trying to represent as closely as possible to reality in a model how at the street and a neighbourhood level, things like traffic flow, trees and urban form change the air we’re breathing.
What is your work at the Clean Air Fund?
I’m overseeing a couple of programs we have on two pollutants that affect both climate change and human health, and that currently kind of fall between the gaps of a lot of the policy action we see that’s often either on climate change or air pollution. We have a three year program on black carbon, and within that we are making grants and developing strategies from science, strategic communications, policy and advocacy and solutions. And then we’re also in the midst of a project on tropospheric ozone.
We launched a report at COP in Baku, and are currently developing a blueprint for what we think is needed from philanthropy, but also the development-funder space. Mapping out where to go from where we’re at now in terms of tackling these issues to where we need to be in the future. So thinking through what the research gaps are, what are the policy focuses, what can different governments do to take a leadership role in this?
What is tropospheric ozone and why should we worry about it?
It’s both a greenhouse gas and an air pollutant, so today it’s directly contributing to about 0.2 degrees of global warming. But it’s also responsible for half a million premature deaths per year because it hurts our lungs when we breathe it in, and as much as 26% of some crops are lost , because it hurts the plants when they breathe it in.
What’s the focus of your research into this problem?
It seems somewhat intuitive sometimes to think that all of the different gasses and particles that humans are emitting into the atmosphere because of cars, because of power plants, because of a range of different activities, will affect both air pollution and climate change. But in practice, often we end up trying to deal with these two things quite separately, and the discourse is also separate.
The reason we’re working on trying to support better regulation and understanding of these pollutants by policymakers and others is because that brings about quite a unique opportunity to have some win-wins between tackling climate change and tackling air pollution together. That’s a really important message to kind of focus on the fact that we can deal with two big environmental issues together.
The term ‘ozone’ connotes as something we know helps protect the planet. Why is tropospheric so different?
From a communications perspective, the major challenge is that it’s called ozone, and most of our understanding is that ozone is a good thing. Ozone as a gas is really good at absorbing things like radiation and light. So when ozone is really high up in the atmosphere, it is stopping the UV rays from the sun. And this is good. It’s protecting life on Earth. But when ozone is lower down in the atmosphere, it’s absorbing the heat that’s coming back off the surface of the planet, and that’s why it’s a greenhouse gas.
Is this low-lying ozone naturally occurring, or affected by human activity?
It’s being exacerbated by increased emissions of precursors of tropospheric ozone. So another unique challenge, or reason that this is complicated but really interesting, is, unlike most other pollutants, tropospheric ozone isn’t emitted directly.
Increasing methane emissions is going to drive up tropospheric ozone levels, and then other emissions, such as nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide, all of these are going to contribute to how high levels of tropospheric ozone are. And this means that if you look at the world map, you can see where tropospheric ozone is really high and where it’s lower, and this depends on the interaction of these different pollutants, as well as local conditions like the level of sunlight and how hot it is.
I think it’s such a nice analogy the fact that the ozone layer is an example of international research success tackling an environmental problem. The Montreal Protocol [which banned ozone depleting substances such as CFCs] is a great example of how countries can collaborate and agree on a problem and then tackle its sources and improve the problem.
In Europe and the UK, we already have a similar protocol called the Gothenburg protocol, which is focused on getting at troposphere ozone. And this is being revised at the moment. The kind of renegotiation is planned to be complete by the end of 2026 so we have an opportunity right now for the UK, Europe, US, Canada, and other parties to the Gothenburg Protocol to step up and be a bit more ambitious on this.
What should our priorities be to reduce tropospheric ozone?
It’s important to tackle these precursor emissions, and that will help better inform some of the decisions we’re making across lots of different sectors, from transport to energy. But another key aspect of this is not just to be thinking about this problem from a purely air pollution standpoint.
I think there’s an important case for integrated action on climate change and air pollution. And one stat that I think really drives that home is when we think about the economic benefits, like the economic case to reduce emissions of anything really, there’s a particular statistic that says the economic benefits from having cleaner air by implementing the Paris Agreement, which is a climate thing, would outweigh the costs of actually delivering on the Paris Agreement and doing all the things we need to do to limit us to 1.5 degrees global warming.
Do you think it is becoming harder to communicate and engage with the public on air quality and climate policy, given the complexity of these issues, the weaponisation of information and misinformation surrounding climate policy?
All policy interventions have trade-offs and how well they’re designed in advance can make a massive difference in terms of understanding who’s most affected, who benefits most.
So a broad brush, you know, thinking across some of the hot topics in the UK, around LTNs, low emission zones, things like that, I think a lot comes down to the policy design and the inevitable trade-offs with any intervention. Ultimately, I think action on air pollution is a huge public good that’s often quite hard to see and feel.
Leaning more on my personal experience of growing up in London, in terms of how it feels to walk around the city, and how it smells walking around the city, there’s been huge progress made in recent decades. And you can really track that back to a lineage of policy implementation at the city scale, at the national scale, even at the regional scale, because air pollution is kind of going across borders as well.
The fact that these issues are so complex means if you come to the problem with an agenda, then you can pick out some of the holes. So those trade-offs do leave, I think, most areas of environmental policy open to scepticism and attacks. Often challenges can actually be good because it’s an imperfect system how we’re driving ahead [on things like net zero].
What’s stopping us treating air pollution and climate change as interconnected problems?
Reducing emissions will also improve air pollution and cut premature mortality, increasing the number of days people are working, and bringing healthcare costs down. That sum over a period of time is going to have larger economic benefits than how much it’s going to cost to do all this stuff.
So I think that, in its own right, tells us why for governments, for UN agencies, civil society, there’s actually a really important driver and benefit to link these two things and to think about climate and health together. It feels intuitive that all the gasses and particles we are emitting are going to interact and affect different things.
But the way the system is structured keeps them separate. So in governments, the climate teams and air pollution teams are often in different departments and may even have very limited coordination and interaction.
In terms of the metrics we use, of course particulate matter makes a huge amount of sense from a health perspective but means nothing in terms of climate. In the same way, CO2 is super important and means so much in terms of how we’re tackling mixed greenhouse gasses and global warming. But that doesn’t tell you about more localised climate effects that are often driven by some of these pollutants that do both.
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