Air is Kin

Air is Kin is divided into two parts. The first is Air is Kin Academy, which is a self-guided learning platform. The Academy has audio lessons that are accompanied by workbooks to help contextualise the learnings. We also hold virtual “drop-in” sessions, where people can ask questions about the Academy and raise specific concerns about their advocacy journey.

The second part is a protocol study. The primary objective of this protocol study is to validate a set of questions and collection methodology that produce data accurately reflecting the qualitative health and lived experience of communities affected by air pollution. The questionnaire will be tracking the symptoms and signs of individuals who live in communities being affected by industrial polluters. This is not only crucial to the work being done by communities advocating for clean air, but also to air pollution research as a whole.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 knowledges 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. There is a need to look beyond lawsuits and into health reparations, health justice, and other legal mechanisms to successfully advocate against contamination. Each community needs to be individually supported as each case is nuanced. Here are some guiding recommendations 

    • Community-led actions that prevent industrial polluters to occupy a neighbourhood or an area. 

    • GP education programmes on the effects of air pollution and how to best support their patients who are showing signs and symptoms of contaminated air exposure. 

    • Specialised healthcare programmes for those affected by air contamination.

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

• 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 current metrics that associate health to air pollution are PM2.5 or PM10, however both are measurements of air pollution, not health. There is also no clear explanation on how air pollution standards relate to human physiology. In order to advocate against contamination, we must have a way to measure the impact of air pollution from the persons’ perspective. We have identified the lived experience as being a valid method for generating health metrics as they related to effects of contaminated air.

1. A methodology for Health Reparations

2. A protocol study that provides a lived-experience led methodology to link air pollution to human health outcomes.

3. A co-learning community of clean air advocates

1. Drop in sessions 

2. Schedule a 30 minute  one-to-one with our team to discuss your specific advocacy work