Draft:Clean Air Fund

The Clean Air Fund is a philanthropic foundation focused on alleviating air pollution. It is a UK registered charity established in 2019. It funds and partners with organisations around the world on air quality projects. The foundation's partners include World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization and the C40 Cities’ Global Mayors forum.

The Clean Air Fund works primarily in Bulgaria, India, Poland, Ghana and the UK. The foundation also works on global projects relating to health, climate change and data.

History
The Clean Air Fund was founded by Executive Director Jane Burston in 2019 at the UN Secretary General’s Climate Summit in 2019. The foundation had $50 million in initial funding from the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, ELMA, Guy's & St. Thomas' Charity, the IKEA Foundation, the FiA Foundation and the Oak Foundation, with additional support from the London-based Wellcome Trust. The foundation has since received further funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bernard Van Leer Foundation.

Research and projects
The Clean Air Fund produces an annual analysis of global funding for alleviating air pollution globally from donor governments and philanthropic organisations. The 2021 report found that governments around the world gave 20% more overseas aid funding to fossil fuel projects in 2019 and 2020 than to programmes that help cut air pollution. The 2022 report found that only 0.3% of official development assistance was spent on clean air projects in Africa, despite air pollution being the continent’s second largest cause of death after HIV/AIDS.

In 2020, the Clean Air Fund commissioned public polling, conducted by YouGov, in five countries, which showed that people in the UK, Bulgaria, India, Nigeria, and Poland supported stricter air quality regulations.

In 2021, the foundation launched the first global corporate Alliance for Clean Air at COP26, in partnership with the World Economic Forum. Members of the alliance include Google, Biogen, Accenture, Siemens, Maersk and the Mahindra Group. That same year, founder and director Jane Burston performed a ‘Letter to the 21st Century’ on BBC Radio 4.

The foundation published research on four African cities (Accra, Cairo, Johannesburg and Lagos) in 2022, showing that reducing air pollution could save 125,000 lives and $20 billion in costs while reducing emissions in those cities by about 20% by 2040.

India
In 2021, the foundation commissioned a report by Dalberg Advisors that showed the impact of air pollution on India’s economy. The report found that air pollution costs the Indian economy $95 billion a year.

Poland
The foundation has funded several projects in Poland, including Breathe Warsaw, a project with the City of Warsaw aiming to improve air quality in the Polish capital.

United Kingdom
In 2021, the foundation report with CBI Economics found that plans to expand London’s ultra-low emission zone could prevent at least 600 deaths per year and estimated that reducing air pollution would benefit the UK economy by at least £48 million a year. In 2022, a study by Imperial College London, commissioned by the Clean Air Fund, found that the UK could feasibly meet the World Health Organization interim guidelines by the end of 2030. According to the study, if the UK government delivered on planned clean air policies, the number of people with respiratory diseases would fall by 150,000 a year by 2030.

The foundation also funded the pilot of Breathe London, an air quality monitoring project in London that uses a network of low cost sensors that provide publicly-available real time air quality data.