On Thursday 19th June events across the UK raise awareness about the dangers of air pollution. One woman has done more than most to campaign and lobby for tighter regulations.
I first met Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah when we invited her to speak at our Wen Forum event back in 2019 – Air (e)quality: What’s gender, race and poverty got to do with air pollution? She got up on stage and told her story – not to gain sympathy, but to galvanise. To bring attention to the ways in which air pollution is not just an environmental issue, but a gender and a justice issue.
I remember sitting in the audience, thinking about how her daughter Ella was the same age as my youngest. It’s something that has stayed with me. Because the truth is, any one of us could have a story like Rosamund’s and Ella’s. But in a society where race, class, and gender so often determine your risk of harm, some of us are more likely than others. That’s not acceptable.
For those who might not know her story, Rosamund is the mother of Ella Roberta Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, the first person in the world to have air pollution officially listed as a cause of death. Ella was just nine years old when she died following a severe asthma attack in 2013. It took seven years of campaigning for the truth to be recognised, and for the coroner to rule that air pollution had contributed to her death. That moment wasn’t just a landmark legal victory; it was a turning point in public awareness and environmental health policy.
What Rosamund did, and continues to do, is extraordinary. She transformed her unimaginable grief into a relentless campaign to protect all of our children. She became, as Air Quality News rightly described her, the most recognisable and relentless figure advocating for clean air. Her strength, her clarity, and her refusal to let this issue be sidelined is something I deeply admire.
Her quote in the recent interview still echoes in my mind “I need to dream big so I would like clean air to become a human right all over the world. I believe no matter where you come from, your race, sexuality, religion, doesn’t matter, you’re entitled to breathe clean air.”
The personal is political – especially when it comes to air
At Wen, we’ve always understood that environmental issues aren’t experienced equally. Women, especially women from racialised and marginalised communities, are disproportionately impacted by air pollution. They’re often the ones doing the unpaid care work – taking children to school, pushing prams along polluted roads, and spending more time in indoor spaces where air quality is still poorly regulated.
Rosamund has always understood this too. I last saw Rosamund at our Climate Sisters event at the Barbican in London. It was a room full of women – many of them mothers, many of them activists, all of them concerned about the climate crisis and the air their children breathe. Rosamund chatted to every single woman in that room. She didn’t just deliver a powerful speech and leave. She listened and connected.
Her human and down to earth approach shows that anyone can be an activist and bring about change, although you wouldn’t wish anyone to have to experience such a terrible tragedy in order to do this.
The injustice of inaction
Despite progress in some parts of the UK, notably in London, where it’s clean air zonethe ULEZ, has helped to reduce some pollutants, the national picture is bleak. There is still no clear national legal framework recognising the right to clean air as a human right.
Rosamund has long campaigned for a new Clean Air Act known as Ella’s Law, which would enshrine this human right to clean air into law, and also provide a pathway for the UK to reach the World Health Organisation’s (WHO’s) air quality targets. Our current targets for air quality fall way behind that and indeed the rest of Europe. And the people who suffer most are the ones with the fewest resources and the quietest political voices.
The Government’s inaction is especially stark when viewed through an intersectional lens. Women are more likely to live in poverty, to be primary carers. Children, especially from minoritised backgrounds, are more likely to live near busy roads. Air pollution isn’t just about health; it’s about inequality, invisibility, and political failure.
Clean air as a right, not a privilege
What we need is real, systemic change. We need clean air to be recognised as a human right. That means national regulation that matches the urgency of the crisis. It means proper enforcement against polluters. It means investment in infrastructure that works for everyone, affordable, electrified public transport; cycling lanes with safety and lighting built in; cycling training and support starting at school; low-traffic neighbourhoods that don’t push pollution from one street to another, but actually reduce it overall.
We need more than individual action. We need joined-up policy that addresses the links between pollution, housing, income and health. We need better data on indoor air quality – something that is still shockingly under-researched despite its links to childhood asthma and long-term respiratory illness. And we need political courage to say no to airports that bring increased pollution, and yes to a future where public transport is affordable, reliable, and clean.
At Wen, our work on air pollution includes greening inner city areas in Tower Hamlets, community-based education and advocacy through our Green Baby campaign, particularly indoor environments. And through our Climate Sisters programme we work with women to build the knowledge, power and networks needed to push for safer, healthier futures.
Listening to lived experience
One of Rosamund’s greatest strengths is how she brings people with her. She doesn’t gatekeep her campaign. She invites everyone who shares the goal to join her. That’s real, feminist leadership. And that’s why her work has helped shift the conversation from policy papers to kitchen tables and school gates.
I think often about the women who have shaped my activism. Rosamund is one of them. Not because she’s a public figure or because she won a landmark legal case. But because she made this issue real. Because she has always insisted that clean air is not a statistic, but a matter of life and death.
Through her campaigning she has built a permanent monument to her daughter – not least in the Ella Roberta Foundation and the statue of Ella that was unveiled in Lewisham earlier this year.
Rosamund shows us what courage and persistence look like. And what it means to lead with heart. This Clean Air Day, I hope we can all reflect on the people who have inspired us. And then act. Whether that means joining a campaign, pushing for better local transport, getting on our bike, or simply refusing to accept the status quo.
Because as Rosamund has taught us, dreaming big is the first step. But it’s action that turns those dreams into change.
Kate Metcalf is Co-Director at Wen (Women’s Environmental Network), a UK charity working at the intersection of gender, health, and environmental justice.
This article first appeared in our sister magazine, Air Quality News. You can find the latest edition and back issues here.
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