Wendy Zuckerman
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And if she could do that, it would be a world first.
Rosamund wanted the real reason that Ella died to be official.
But she also thought that perhaps Ella could put a face to all these awful statistics about what pollution is doing to us.
Her lawyer also thought that it would open the door to more lawsuits for other people to force governments around the world to clean our air.
But getting air pollution on a death certificate, it was going to be tricky.
Rosamund had to go to a court to convince a coroner that there was a direct link between pollution and Ella's death.
And even though we have statistics showing that pollution contributes to millions of deaths each year, it's actually really hard to point to a person and say air pollution killed them.
But with Ella, the data was so damning.
She was living under illegal levels of pollution.
And so Rosamund thought she could do this.
In late 2020, almost eight years after Ella died, the second inquest into her death began.
Stephen was an expert witness.
Did you think you'd win?
Was it like you thought this was a slam dunk?
And as Stephen remembers it, the government lawyers really put him to task.
After all the evidence was presented, the coroner had to decide.
Did pollution kill Ella?
The new coroner's report listed air pollution, along with asthma and acute respiratory failure, as Ella's official cause of death.
And since that happened, things have been getting better.
The council where Ella lived has made it way easier for people to find out what's going on with the pollution on any given day.