Original subtitles

There's something about mountains that draws you in.

Perhaps it's the challenge of the climb -

a peak to conquer, an achievement to relish.

Maybe it's the view from the top.

We so rarely get the chance to stop and take in the world around us.

It's good for our minds to focus on the distant horizon.

But it's also, surely, the air up here.

It's fresh, it feels clean.

A lungful of mountain air makes you feel alive.

It's a sad indication of the state of the air

that surrounds so many of us in our everyday lives

that it doesn't feel like this.

We routinely talk about healthy food and clean water.

But how often do we spare a thought for what enters our lungs?

We fill our lungs with six litres of air every minute, on average.

Yet as a result of our activities today,

our atmosphere, especially for those living in cities,

is carrying all sorts of unhealthy particles.

The World Health Organization calls air pollution the silent killer.

Globally, 90% of us breathe unclear air every day.

Air pollution is proven to shorten our lifetimes,

and it hits the vulnerable -

children, the sick and the elderly -

hardest of all.

That's why one of the five goals of the Earthshot Prize

is to clean our air.

Every year until 2030,

the prize will award £1 million

to a project that will help us to achieve this goal.

In this film we will explore the causes of air pollution

and the toll it's taking on our health.

We meet people around the world

working on innovative solutions.

And I'll introduce you to the three finalists

shortlisted for this year's Earthshot Prize.

Here to tell the story of how we can clean our air

are Sir David Attenborough

and the only member of our Earthshot Prize council

to travel beyond the atmosphere we all share,

Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki.

Yeah, like this, coming here.

And just sit. Like this.

The air in Earth's atmosphere is fundamental to life.

Our life-sustaining air is a product of billions of years of evolution.

Before life evolved, the atmosphere was a toxic mix of methane, hydrogen

and high levels of carbon dioxide.

But as plants developed and started to photosynthesise,

they began to remove the toxins and flood the atmosphere with oxygen,

allowing the evolution of animals with high oxygen demands,

like ourselves...

..and even turning the sky blue.

For much of Earth's history, the gases in our atmosphere

have remained broadly stable.

But over the last 200 years,

as humankind entered the Industrial Age,

our polluting activities

have threatened the stability of our air quality.

Every year, we emit up to 100 times the amount of carbon dioxide

of all the volcanoes on Earth.

Our activities have been dirtying and poisoning the Earth's

life-giving air to the point that we are choking ourselves

and the natural world that helps to sustain us.

We're not unaware of this. We do so in plain sight.

The main causes of air pollution are easy to identify.

And one is the reliance on polluting fuels to heat our homes.

Ulaanbaatar has regularly ranked

as one of the world's most polluted cities.

In recent years the migration of nomadic people from the countryside

to the city has increased,

with many setting up residence in traditional homes, called gers,

on the outskirts.

In winter, temperatures drop below -40 degrees centigrade.

And coal is one of the few affordable fuels

for the people to heat their homes at these brutally cold times.

Coal is a fossil fuel, and it's one of the dirtiest.

When coal is burned, it releases harmful airborne pollutants

such as sulphur dioxide - a toxic gas -

and particulates, or tiny particles,

which are commonly associated with soot.

These pollutants lead to smog in the air,

and when breathed in

can cause inflammation in the body

and health issues that range from lung damage

to heart disorders to cancer.

In Ulaanbaatar, around 600,000 tonnes of coal is burned each winter

inside homes across the city,

whilst huge power plants add to the already toxic air.

And for some, the only option of employment

is in the very industry that so greatly affects their lives.

Efforts have been made to replace raw coal

with less polluting, but more expensive, refined coal briquettes.

But even at a subsidised price,

low-income families struggle to heat their homes safely.

Studies have shown that coal

and other cheap polluting fuels like charcoal

are used as a domestic fuel

by more than two billion people around the world.

But such dense pollution is rarely seen in wealthier countries,

where coal burning is now mostly kept out of cities.

Here, societies are changing to cleaner domestic fuels

like natural gas and electricity.

Yet unclean air is here too,

due primarily to one thing.

So many children in my year had asthma.

They would be comparing their pumps,

they would be talking about their pumps.

It was almost part of the culture to have asthma.

I was aware that Ella had asthma

but I wasn't aware of how serious it was.

Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah

died in 2013 at the age of just nine.

An inquest into Ella's death

revealed a pattern linking spikes in illegal levels of air pollution

and the severity of her asthma attacks.

The inquest, which took seven years to resolve,

made a landmark ruling in 2020 -

for the first time in the UK,

air pollution was recorded as a cause of death.

We were all part of the same community.

It was definitely a loss that we all collectively felt

when she passed away.

Thinking about it now, it's honestly so shocking.

How is this not a red flag for everyone in our community

that so many children had asthma and this issue was very much linked

to the area that we lived in which was highly polluted?

Because you can't always see air pollution,

the dangers of it often feel hidden or less severe.

As with the burning of coal,

the combustion of fossil fuels, such as diesel and petroleum,

that power our transport,

also release dangerous gases and particulates into our air.

Nitrogen dioxide, one of the pollutants emitted from vehicles,

can damage our lungs when breathed in,

and worsen pre-existing health problems such as asthma.

Particulate pollution from vehicles

not only comes from the combustion of fossil fuels

but from the wear and tear of brakes and tyres.

Emerging research shows that UFPs, or ultrafine particles,

are especially dangerous to our health.

Measuring at less than 0.1 microns in diameter,

which is smaller than many airborne viruses,

the tiny size of these particulates makes them extremely inhalable.

Whether emitted from the combustion of fossil fuels

or the wear and tear of brakes and tyres,

these particulates not only enter our lungs

but are small enough to enter the bloodstream,

and can travel to different organs in the body,

the result of which can cause tissue damage, inflammation of organs

and lead to chronic health issues such as heart disease and strokes.

I'm constantly thinking about what is entering my lungs

when I'm walking down busy roads.

How could my commute to school actually be harming me?

I wonder if my lungs' capacity is reduced.

I wonder if I'm going to have a shorter live expectancy

simply because of the air that I'm breathing right now.

There are so many issues that come from air pollution

that impact the development of children.

Air pollution is even found in placentas.

It is affecting us before we are even born.

My generation has inherited a polluted and dirty planet

that it is now our role to fix and clean up.

Because it's our lives that depend on it.

The battle has begun in London to reduce polluting transport

with an Ultra Low Emission Zone in the centre

and support for a new generation of greener public transport.

But children in cities around the world

are still faced with harmful levels of airborne pollutants.

Children's developing bodies are particularly vulnerable

to the impacts of air pollution.

The World Health Organization states that, every day,

more than 90% of the world's children breathe air

that is so polluted it puts their health and development at risk.

But it's not only the health of children,

nor the air quality in our cities, that is a cause for concern.

The air around us has travelled for thousands of miles,

and on its journey across the planet,

it picks up particulates and toxic gases

emitted from our polluting activities,

carrying them far from source.

The interconnectivity of our global air currents

means that air pollution doesn't recognise borders,

so it doesn't matter where you live on Earth -

in the city or far from it -

air pollution will affect your life, as the Sami reindeer herders

from northern Scandinavia have experienced.

Chernobyl was perhaps one of the worst single air pollution events

in modern history.

On April the 26th, 1987,

the nuclear power plant exploded,

casting radioactive particles into the atmosphere.

The plumes of deadly radioactive material

spread hundreds of miles across Europe

with devastating effects to communities and the natural world.

Chernobyl was a unique event.

Yet data have shown that toxic gases like sulphur dioxide

and particulates from industry and power generation

are also carried in air currents around Europe.

The movement of air about the globe means that, ultimately,

we share our air pollution with each other,

and with the natural world.

With each passing year, we continue to emit particulates

and toxic gases into our air.

Air pollution, both indoors and outdoors,

is now a leading risk factor for death and disability worldwide.

Nine out of ten of us live our lives in an environment of unhealthy air.

The full effect of our air pollution on the natural world

is still being assessed,

but studies have shown that the particulates we're adding to the air

are making the atmosphere less transparent,

lowering the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface,

and causing an effect known as global dimming.

The dimmer sunlight at the surface can reduce evaporation,

impeding nature's water cycle and potentially lowering rainfall

in some parts of the world.

Our dirtying of the air comes back to affect us all.

It causes premature deaths, and by changing the patterns of rainfall,

it may lead to droughts and failed harvests.

The next few decades are expected to bring a growth in cities,

of heavy industry, and of vehicle use around the world.

How can we ensure that this can happen

without making the air we share dirtier still?

What the world needs

is real, built examples

of how to do things differently.

My name is Bjarke Ingels. I'm an architect.

Architecture, essentially, is the art and science

of turning fiction into fact, or turning fantasy into reality.

So you can imagine, you know,

a power plant with a ski slope on the roof,

and ten years later that's just how it is.

Normally when you think about power plants

or waste management facilities you think about giant eyesores,

but in this case we could actually turn it into a man-made mountain,

a 100-metre tall landscape,

as a way to change people's minds about what can a power plant be?

When you take the elevator up to the top of the mountain,

you are actually looking into the belly of the beast,

or the inside of the mountain.

Half of the volume inside the mountain is not the machinery

that turns the waste into energy,

it's actually the machinery that extracts and filters.

A normal chimney represents the failures of our technology

or our society, that it's essentially all the air pollution

that we sort of just leak out

and if we build the chimney high enough we hope it sort of goes away

and disappears, and we've learned that it doesn't.

Whereas in this case, the Copenhageners can now

actually alpine ski in the middle of a country that has no mountains

because the power plant that turns our waste into electricity

and district heating is so clean that you almost have

fresh mountain air on top of it.

I'm not saying that all power plants should be skiable,

but the technologies that are inside CopenHill,

of course, are scalable.

Sustainable buildings, clean technology,

allows you to imagine a much more exciting and inviting city

than one where you really have to stay far away

from all the sort of dirty industry.

Sustainability should not only be a kind of moral imperative,

or let's say, call it necessary sacrifice.

I love that idea that it's almost radically changing the expectation

for what the future might hold.

Houston, the Eagle has landed.

That's one small step for man.

One giant leap for mankind.

If you ever stop and look at a tyre...

It's something that is so ordinary that I think a lot of us

don't really take the time to look at,

but, like, they're a huge, like, object,

like, rolling around our cities all the time, wearing down.

I'm Siobhan Anderson.

I'm one of the four co-founders of The Tyre Collective.

We all decided to work together to focus on pollution

because we felt like it was something where we could intervene

and really make a tangible impact.

In cities we've become really focused on air pollution

from tailpipe emissions.

But we know that vehicles,

when they drive, accelerate, brake and corner...

..they produce these things called non-exhaust emissions,

which is very fine particles that can become airborne,

and tyre wear contributes to that.

To try and visualise how much different vehicles produce,

we were actually able to track the longest bus route in London.

And then we calculated the total amount of tyre wear

that was produced in 24 hours from that,

and it produced a cube that was about the size of a grapefruit.

It was really big. and it completely shocked us.

I think about every car that you see on the road

and imagining that that's what's coming off of that car,

going into our air and into our water.

That was one of the starting points

that convinced us that we needed to do something about this.

We wanted to make an impact now,

before more could be added to the environment.

When these particles are created,

if you imagine a spinning wheel,

as they come off right at the ground, at the contact patch,

they're actually charged due to the friction of the road.

And what this is means is, as they're flying through the air,

we can actually use electrostatics...

..to capture and attract them.

Right now we're creating a retrofittable device,

so this would be able to go on any vehicle.

Something like a box behind the wheel.

From there, we are actually able to store them

in a different storage tank in our device

where they can be removed and collected.

Right now is the perfect time

to try and create systemic change that's needed.

As we're shifting towards electric vehicles,

we definitely need to make sure that we really are considering

every source of pollution in that transition.

I really hope that the technology that we're developing will be

on every vehicle out there that has a wheel or a tyre,

to make sure that this pollution is really stopped.

My name is Esther An.

I'm the Chief Sustainability Officer at City Developments Limited.

Sustainability has always been at the heart of the way we design.

I will say that I am passionate about all things sustainability.

It's kind of like an addiction.

Building our cities sustainably with nature in mind

can make a huge impact,

especially on our air quality.

But sadly, many urban cities have become concrete jungles,

with buildings towering all over.

We all know that plants absorb carbon and help to filter toxins.

They are nature's greatest air purifier.

We need to really appreciate nature and tap into the energy

and positivity that nature can provide us.

We must adopt biophilic design

in the way we design and build our infrastructure.

If you can adopt biophilic design in your infrastructure

and in your building, it's definitely, you know,

benefitting users and making everyone happier, healthier

and even more productive.

Biophilia literally means a love of nature.

It is about living in harmony with,

and also embracing, nature - not fighting it.

Today, Singapore has gone one step further

to set its sight on becoming a city in nature.

This is the world we want for our future generations,

a world that, you know, you have clean air, blue sky

and happiness and health for everyone.

Our shared air could be made far cleaner and healthier

if we put our collective energies and minds to the task.

The Earthshot Prize is here to recognise those efforts

by rewarding and supporting the most innovative ideas

to bring this inspiring ambition to pass.

And here are the finalists of the first-ever Earthshot Prize

to clean our air.

We head to India to meet the young designer of an ironing cart

that uses solar panels instead of polluting fuel.

India is currently grappling

with significant air pollution in its cities.

The bad air quality has a long list of causes.

One is the burning of polluting fuels like charcoal on the streets

by the country's estimated ten million ironing vendors.

At just 14 years old, Vinisha Umashankar,

a student from Tamil Nadu,

has come up with the beginnings of a clean solution.

The story started when I was 12 years old

and I was just coming back home from school

and I noticed the ironing vendors in my street using charcoal.

I knew there was something wrong about it

so I did a bit of research and I figured out

that charcoal causes air pollution, respiratory diseases,

and all of this is linked to climate change.

In 2019, with a lot of homework, as well as the attention and support

of India's National Innovation Foundation,

Vinisha came up with her winning design for a solar ironing cart.

The cart has solar panels forming its roof,

and these are connected to a battery.

It takes around five hours of bright sunshine to fully charge.

And this powers the iron for six hours.

It even has a mobile phone charging point,

meaning street vendors can gain extra income

by selling their stored solar energy.

The benefits of the cart being mobile is that the ironing vendors

don't need to stay stationary in one place.

Instead, they can move across town and cover a larger area

thus expanding their customer base.

Vinisha's idea represents one specific application,

but its significance is that it proves a point -

wherever we use polluting fuels, we can swap them for clean energy.

With more funding, she wants to mass-produce the carts cheaply

so that street vendors using charcoal in India,

the rest of Asia and Africa, can also benefit.

Vinisha deserves her place on this list because she's an inspiration.

Proof that you're never too young to see a problem, take action,

and innovate.

Now, there's just one last feature -

a very loud horn to let you know that the ironing vendor

is now in your street.

Our next finalist

has helped transform China's air quality in recent years

with an app that enables the naming and shaming of the worst polluters.

For many years, China has been the world's biggest manufacturer,

with a reputation for exceptionally high levels of air pollution.

The people of China desperately needed to get their blue skies back,

and a former journalist, Ma Jun,

decided to use an app to let them do so.

During the smoggy season,

checking the air quality is like checking the weather.

Our users can find out

whether they should wear a mask, open the window,

or whether it's safe to send their children outside to play.

Or if it's not, they can figure out who is polluting and tweet it.

When China began to release the emissions data

for thousands of factories...

..Ma Jun placed it all on a map in an app,

revealing to everyone when and where the air was dirty

and who was making it dirty.

It's a way for us to tap into transparency

and information technologies

to empower millions of people to join the clean-up efforts.

Ordinary citizens can use the app to call out polluters,

and major brands are using the app to monitor

and improve the environmental performance of their suppliers.

The app is making the polluters change their ways.

In just one case,

a major listed steel plant spent more than $1 billion

to make a very deep cut of its emission.

With more than ten million downloads,

the app has already had a huge impact.

To date, it has led to reduced pollution at more than 10,000

of China's most seriously polluting factories.

So now the blue skies are coming back to China.

But Ma Jun doesn't want to stop there.

He now has plans to develop the app

for other polluted parts of the world.

I hope more people in the world can see the value of the combination of

technology, transparency and public participation, and be more hopeful

to join the efforts to bring back those blue skies.

Blue Map App shows the potential impact of new technology

and the online community and teaches the world a lesson -

that clever innovation combined with public participation

is a recipe for progress.

For our final idea, we head back to India

to learn about the Takachar machine,

a portable device that can safely burn crop waste,

to deal with a key source of air pollution in India.

Each year, huge amounts of crop residues are burnt by rural farmers

in India, leading to urban smog in nearby cities.

A young engineer decided to take action.

I've been experiencing

poor quality of air since childhood.

Open burning of crop residues

contribute about 25-30% of the smog

and they take the already bad quality of air

to an extremely poor level.

What we have found is that farmers do not want to burn

this agricultural waste

and also are aware of the smoke problem,

as it affects their families as well.

But due to lack of alternatives,

they have no other choice but to burn them in the open.

Vidyut co-developed the Takachar machine

which uses a low-oxygen burning technique

to not only reduce pollution

but also convert the farmers' waste into valuable fertiliser and fuels.

And because it's portable, it can do so right in the fields.

We feed in agricultural waste, like rice straw, coconut shells,

into the machine.

The agriculture waste then undergo torrefaction,

which is essentially roasting the biomass

between 200-350 degrees Celsius.

This process superheats the residues while starving them of oxygen,

producing much less smoke and emissions.

It then gets converted to a carbon-rich material

and gets collected in a box, ready to be stored and packaged.

The carbon-rich product is used by the farmers as fuel,

fertiliser, or sold to industry for factory

and domestic water filtration.

It can consume up to 200kg per hour of agricultural and forest waste,

so if you run it for ten hours a day, its capacity is two tonnes.

Takachar are providing a meaningful solution

that benefits both farmers and the planet.

If scaled up, they believe they have the potential to increase

the income of rural communities

while improving the air quality of 200 million people.

These incredible solutions

could ultimately improve the lives of so many of us.

One of these projects will soon win the Earthshot Prize

and get the support, platform and resources it needs

to take the initiative to scale.

Humans can achieve remarkable things when we set our minds to it.

In the next episode,

we will learn how we may achieve the fourth Earthshot

and revive our oceans.

We'll discover a fishing community in Mexico

that has quadrupled its marine life in 15 years,

meet sniffer dogs helping us to understand and halt

our poisoning of the seas,

and find people all over the world who are demonstrating

just how quickly and spectacularly the oceans can recover -

if we let them.