A breath of FRESH AIR

From encouraging cycling to implementing Ultra-Low Emission Oliver Lord has made London's controversial Zone, eco campaigner great strides towards cutting pollution

- Dino Bonacic 

Air is essential to human life - we all A know this. Yet because we can't see it, it's the one element at the core of our existence whose quality has historically been the least controlled. It sounds obvious, but you wouldn't drink tap water if it was brown, or eat food that was rotten, or sleep in an unsafe environment. But polluted air is all around us and we have no choice but to take it in.

In 2018, the UK government named poor air quality as the "largest environmental risk to public health in the UK", causing chronic conditions and reducing life expectancy. And research conducted in 2019 by analyst platform State of Global Air showed that air pollution accounts for more than one in nine deaths around the world.

As a specialist in clean air and sustainable transport, Oliver Lord, a 38-year-old environmental campaigner and gay man, is at the forefront of improving our environment in the UK. In his current role as UK head of campaigns for international charity Clean Cities Campaign (CCC), Oliver - or Oli to most people is helping to influence public opinion as well as maintaining the pressure on key decision-makers who form air-quality policies.

Cities, of course, are pollution hotspots, making them increasingly unhealthy places to live. "We are about applying positive pressure onto the leaders of big cities; shaping a pathway to what we call zero-emission mobility. This means being able to go around the city without having to harm the planet at the same time," he tells me. He then adds: "I would never want the campaign that I work for to come across like we're asking people not to do things or not to go out. It's about putting options on the table that help people move in the best way possible."