Devi Sridhar

London introducing, you know, a low emission zone and an ultra low emission zone saying within this, you know, trying to reduce congestion, trying to get people moving through, you know, you know, non-polluting vehicles or public transport, you know,

You do see this in places like Zurich, the cleanest air in the world, but also even places like Tokyo, which, given the population density, you'd expect to have much more pollution, and they're not using newer tech.

And so I guess the idea being that once you put a plan in place that it is a problem and you want to fix it, generally solutions work and it gets better.

That's one of, I guess, the big lessons in the book, that actually once you decide something is fixable, it gets fixed.

And when you decide something is not fixable...

guess what?

It doesn't get fixed.

And I think there, the first thing you see in Cape Town, I raised in South Africa, the first thing is recognizing it's a problem and putting in solutions, meaningful ones.

And it's interesting.

I mean, I also raise it because here, let's say in Edinburgh, we have a new low emission zone.

There's huge efforts to make the air clean, but people take them for granted.

And that's why I bring these examples of places where they don't

Nothing is done.

And I say, that's what it could be.

That's the future.

If we don't actually actively manage our air quality and what it does to our lungs.

And coming back to Delhi, the idea that 50% of kids living in the city have damaged lungs already.

I'm like, you can go about your day, do what you can.

And then the rise of the bottled air industry, which I hadn't known about, which is like mottled off bottled water, which is trying to bottle air and bring it to places that don't have clean air.

So you can individually breathe your clean air alongside your air purifier.