A new five-year plan is set to help protect residents' health and fight climate change in Hammersmith & Fulham.
Our new Air Quality Action Plan – approved at a Cabinet meeting on Monday (16 December) – lays out how we'll tackle the issue of our toxic air.
Cllr Stephen Cowan, Leader of H&F, said:
Nobody wants to drink a glass of dirty water. Yet roughly 18 times each minute we breathe in contaminated, poisonous air. By working together, we can improve the air we breathe and the health and wellbeing of everyone who lives in, works in, or visits our great borough."
Data from our 60 monitoring stations shows there isn't a single part of H&F where air quality meets the Word Health Organization (WHO)'s 'safe' standards.
Meanwhile, more than seven per cent of local deaths were linked to air pollution in 2022, making H&F the tenth worst area for air pollution in England.
Something in the air
While the EU recently announced it will halve permitted pollution levels by 2030, H&F's new targets go further to match the stricter – and safer – WHO recommendations to cut nitrogen dioxide limits to just a quarter of current levels.
The toxic air in our borough comes from vehicle fumes on our roads, gas boilers and diesel generators in our buildings, and dust from construction work. It causes cancer, strokes, heart disease and dementia and an increased risk of mental health problems. It's particularly dangerous for young children, stunting their growing lungs and affecting brain development.
Backed by our new action plan, we're working closely with experts at Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust through our Better Air, Better Health partnership to understand and tackle these risks.
Our new plan will help:
- reduce traffic in residential areas
- expand our network of electric vehicle charging points
- add more trees and green spaces
- introduce cleaner heating systems in buildings
- act on indoor air pollution.
Making progress across H&F
By removing 15,000 cars a day from residential streets in South Fulham, we're preventing 1.9 tonnes of carbon and 1.35kg of deadly nitrogen oxide every day.
Other recent achievements include:
- connecting our Civic Campus heat pump system to the Hammersmith heat network
- planting our fifth Tiny Forest in H&F, adding a total of 3,000 new trees to help clear the air
- delivering 134 new energy-efficient homes built to Passivhaus standards in Fulham
Check out the full list of key achievements in our fight on dirty air in the latest edition of our Climate Connects newsletter. Subscribe to monthly updates here.
