A personal airquality tracker that lets you know what youre breathing Romain Lacombe
So for the past 12 years,
I’ve been obsessed with this idea
that climate change
is an information issue
that computers will help us fight.
I went from data science
to climate policy research,
from tech to public service,
in pursuit of better data
to avoid the wasted energy,
resources, opportunities
that lead to runaway carbon emissions.
Until one day, running in the streets
with a friend, it hit me:
the same cars, factories, power plants
whose emissions are wrecking
our climate over time
also release harmful, local pollutants
that threaten our health
right here and right now.
All this time I’d focused
on the long-term environmental risk
when I should have been up in arms
about the immediate health impact
of pollutants in the air.
Air pollution is a burning
public health crisis.
It kills seven million people every year,
it costs five trillion dollars
to the world economy
and, worst, it robs us
of our most precious gift,
the years in our lives:
six months of life expectancy
in my hometown of Paris
and up to three, four, five years
in parts of India and China.
And in the US, more people die
from car exhaust than from car accidents.
So how do we protect
ourselves from pollution?
The reason it’s difficult
is an information gap.
We simply lack the data
to understand our exposure.
And that’s because the way
we monitor air quality today
is designed not to help people breathe
but to help governments govern.
Most major cities operate networks
of air-quality monitoring stations
like this one in London,
to decide when to cut traffic
or when to shut down factories.
And these machines
are like the computers from the ’60s
that filled entire rooms.
They’re incredibly precise
but incredibly large,
heavy, costly –
so much that you can only deploy
just a few of them,
and they cannot move.
So to governments,
air pollution looks like this.
But for the rest of us,
air quality looks like this.
It changes all the time:
hour by hour, street by street,
up to eight times
within a single city block.
And even more from indoor to outdoor.
So unless you happen to be walking
right next to one of those stations,
they just cannot tell you
what you breathe.
So what would environmental
protection look like
if it was designed
for the age of the smartphone?
So for the past three years,
my team and I have been
building a technology
that helps you know what you breathe
and fits in your hand.
Flow is a personal air-quality tracker
that you can wear with you
on a backpack, a bike, a stroller.
It’s packed with miniature sensors
that monitor the most important
pollutants in the air around you,
like nitrogen oxides,
the exhaust gas from cars,
or particulate matter
that gets into your bloodstream
and creates strokes and heart issues.
Or volatile organic compounds,
the thousands of chemicals
in everyday products
that we end up breathing.
And that makes this data actionable
and helps you understand
what you’re breathing
by telling you where and when
you’ve been exposed to poor air quality,
and that way you can make
informed decisions
to take action against pollution.
You can change the products
you use at home,
you can find the best route
to cycle to work,
you can run when pollution is not peaking
and you can find the best park
to bring your children out.
Over time you build better habits
to decrease your exposure to pollution,
and by tracking air quality around them,
cyclists, commuters, parents
will also contribute
to mapping air quality in their city.
So we’re building more than a device,
but a community.
And last summer,
we sent early prototypes of our technology
to 100 volunteers in London,
and together they mapped air quality
across 1,000 miles of sidewalk
and 20 percent of all of central London.
So our goal now is to scale
this work around the world,
to crowdsource data so we can map
air quality on every street,
to build an unprecedented database
so scientists can research pollution,
and to empower citizens,
civic leaders, policy makers
to support clean-air policies for change.
Because this can and must change.
Remember cigarettes in bars?
It took decades of lung cancer research
and second-hand smoking studies,
but eventually, we reached a tipping point
and we passed smoking-ban laws.
We must reach the same tipping point
for air quality and I believe we will.
In the past couple years alone,
governments have fined
carmakers record amounts
for cheating on emission standards.
Cities have passed congestion charges
or built bike lanes –
like Paris that turned this highway,
right next to my home,
in the middle of the city,
into a waterfront park.
And now mayors around the world
are thinking of banning diesel outright
by 2025, 2030, 2035.
But how much faster could we go,
how many lives could we save?
Technology alone
will not solve climate change,
nor will it make air pollution
disappear overnight.
But it can make the quality
of our air much more transparent,
and if we can empower people
to take action
to improve their own health,
then together we can act
to bring an end to our pollution.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)