PERTH, AUSTRALIA: The City of Perth in Western Australia (WA), known as one of the most isolated … [+]
Like every graduate, the co-founder and CEO of the climate-tech startup Clarity Movement Co, David Lu can still remember the day he first stepped onto the University of California campus at Berkeley, many years ago.
“The first impression I got was ‘why every color is so vivid and so bright?'” he told Forbes. “It wasn’t until later that I realized, it was because not everything was covered by a layer of dust, which was the situation in China, while I was there.”
It was while at Berkeley, he began to combine his passion for the environment with data. First, he was a key contributor to the University of California’s Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign, and now he is the CEO of Clarity Movement Co, which is bringing air quality sensing to cities around the globe.
“Clean air is a fundamental human right,” he told Forbes. “Our motivation is simple. If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it. According to the most recent World Health Organization report, 90% of the Earth’s population are breathing air that fails the current recommendations, so air quality monitoring is fast becoming a part of the urban infrastructure.”
And as more people move into cities, he added that air pollution is slowly evolving into not just an urbanization problem, but a climate and an environmental justice problem, as well.
Lu said that when Clarity was founded, air quality monitors were “literally the size of a car”, but as the technology has progressed so much, they have developed a range of small sensor nodes, which can be installed on a hyper local level to supplement the traditional reference monitoring station.
These nodes can measure air pollution levels – such as PM 2.5 and NO2 – and feed the data back to a central hub, using solar power and cellular communication. Thousands of Clarity nodes have been successfully installed in hundreds of cities, including London, Los Angeles, Singapore, and the Philippines.
The latest of these networks are in Australia, where Clarity has partnered with the Royal Automobile Club Western Australia in Perth, and CleanAir Schools in Sydney to roll out a total of 400 new air quality measurement points.
A 200-sensor network will cover an area of 9,700 square kilometers in Perth, Western Australia. Later this year, the RAC Air Health Monitor will be made publicly accessible, which will map air quality in real-time at a resolution of 200m by 200m enabled by Clarity’s commercial partner, Ramboll.
Clarity is also proud to partner with UNSW Digital Grid Futures Institute on the CleanAir Schools program, which is expanding the current air quality monitoring network from six to 100 schools across New South Wales over the next two years
Lu said having these air quality node networks is a “game changer” for scientists, governments and community groups who want to access localized real-time data and tackle the issue of pollution head on.
“It’s important to keep the bigger picture in mind. We want to do something positive for the communities in our cities. And in our experience, the most successful projects involve different government bodies, community groups, and even local businesses trying to solve this problem together.”
He cites the example of London mayor Sadiq Khan, who has worked with local authorities and community groups to build one of the densest air quality monitoring networks in the world.
“Air pollution really needs a bottoms-up approach because government departments do not necessarily know what’s happening on the ground. There are some
neighborhoods out there who are underrepresented in the decision-making process, but who are also overly exposed to air pollutants.”
Doctor Meiling Gao, chief operating officer at Clarity Movement Co, said it is also important that air pollution is positioned as a health issue, as the timescale for impacts is much shorter than some impacts from climate change and therefore can be more relatable and readily visible to people.
“Within the realm of public health, air pollution is almost like the black sheep of the family because the time scales it operates on may not be as pressing as that of infectious diseases,” she added.
“And a lot of public health departments are not responsible for regulating ambient air pollution, because they do not have the jurisdiction but having these sensor networks gives us long-term data to see how impactful transportation, energy, and built environment policies really are on the quality of the air we breathe. Communication is super-critical, and we need to make sure that people understand how air pollution fits in with all the other public health risks people are facing.”
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