The air has no borders. It flows between us, connecting everyone. If your neighbor burns leaves in their backyard, you can smell the smoke in yours. When our air is polluted, the consequences are deadly. Air pollution causes more than 8 million premature deaths every year, along with a host of serious health problems such as asthma, lung cancer, pneumonia, cognitive impairment, and more.
The economic damage caused by air pollution is also staggering, causing health damage estimated more than $8 trillion every year. Clean air, on the other hand, leads to greater health and prosperity. Studies show that investing $1 in improving air quality leads to $32 in economic benefits.
Our Common Air believes clean air is a shared economic asset that we all need to survive and thrive. The international commission is strengthening the commitment of global leaders to take tangible steps to protect clean air. In early 2024, Our Common Air held a convening at the Bellagio Center to lay out the economic and health benefits of reducing air pollution and align members on a clear call to action. Less than two years later, the organization has made major progress in building readiness for clean air protection around the world, including securing a billion-dollar guarantee from the World Bank to support clean air investments.
Chaired by Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and Former World Bank Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the commission is a who’s who of global leaders, scientists, policy experts, clean-air advocates, and more. Managing its work is Aafreen Siddiqui, who was awarded a 2025 Big Bets Fellowship from The Rockefeller Foundation to support her efforts. With extensive experience working with national governments and international institutions, Siddiqui is perfectly positioned to help Our Common Air spark collective action through stronger commitments, smarter investments, and more effective accountability measures. We spoke to her about fostering engagement on the global stage, what it takes to support effective policy implementation, the power of convening, and more.
The problem isn’t a lack of solutions for air quality. We have plenty, and they work. But driving adoption requires collaborative commitment.
Aafreen SiddiquiHead of Secretariate, Our Common Air
What drew you to work with Our Common Air?
I’ve spent my life working in public-sector innovation, governance, and public policy. But I wasn’t a climate change professional before Our Common Air. When a think tank reached out to me about taking the role, I said “I don’t think I’m the best fit because I don’t have the technical expertise.” Their CEO told me that they had lots of technical expertise, but they needed someone to lead the secretariat who could engage with these leaders and weave their contributions into a collective ambition towards clean air. So, I came on board.
Awareness and interest are important, but they can’t achieve anything if they’re not translated into commitment. That’s Our Common Air’s motivation. There are thousands of international protocols and conventions on so many things, but not on air quality, which takes millions of lives every year. That doesn’t make sense. Our goal is to foster collaboration and build global momentum that could lead to an international framework like the Montreal Protocol for clean air. It’s a big dream, but that’s our ambition.
It helps that our commission brings so much power, knowledge, and experience. One co-chair is the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, and the other is the former Chief Scientist for the World Health Organization. We have commissioners who are mayors, diplomats, bureaucrats, former ministers, experts and youth champions from across the world. This is a very different pool of leaders. They are extremely motivated to advocate for clean air, and they’ve been doing it right from the beginning.
What are the biggest obstacles to the adoption of approaches that protect clean air?
Air pollution is everybody’s problem, but it’s nobody’s problem. The health minister, the environment minister, and the transport minister might all have it on their radar, but none of them owns the problem, so no one is accountable. There’s no one who has to step up and say, “I’m responsible for the bad air that the children in my city or country are breathing.”
While we have tracking mechanisms and indexes for the most significant challenges of the world, there is none for air pollution, which is choking our lungs, as well as our economies. WHO has definitely issued guidelines, but there’s zero accountability and zero target setting.
There’s also an opportunity to learn from the tremendous successes that are already out there. China’s improvement of the air quality in Beijing has been hailed as a model for the world to follow. London’s ultra-low-emission zones have drastically reduced pollution levels. The European parliament passed air quality legislation that requires planning and finance ministries across to have an air quality rider, which shows how they’ve invested in clean air and what the outcomes have been.
The problem isn’t a lack of solutions for air quality. We have plenty, and they work. But driving adoption requires collaborative commitment. If a prime minister puts it on their agenda, puts out a decree that says, “From today onward, we’re going to monitor air quality of our most polluted cities,” people take action. It doesn’t have to be top-down, either. If people demand that the government do something about polluted air, leaders take notice. Thailand, for example, is the first country in Asia to pass a citizen-driven clean air bill.
What are Our Common Air’s goals, and what would the world look like if you achieve them?
We have a strong ‘Call to Action’ that lays down clear recommendations for making a case for clean air as an economic asset, finding scalable solutions, financing it, tracking and monitoring it and most importantly working together collectively to achieve shared goals. We are advancing these recommendations with a three-pronged approach:
First, we want to put air pollution on the radar of major international summits and convenings—such as COP, World Health Assembly, G20, ASEAN, etc.—in order to push for a global charter that drives countries to report the quality of their air, what they’re doing to improve it, what has worked and what hasn’t. We know that day will come. We don’t know when, but we are moving in that direction.
Next, we want to raise people’s awareness of what their air quality is and whether it’s dangerous, so they can hold their governments responsible. That’s already happening in some cities. In London, a 9-year old named Ella Adoo Kissi-Debra is the first person in the world whose death is officially listed as being caused by air pollution. Her mother took the London City Metropolitan Authority to court, and, after a seven-year fight, they finally tendered a formal apology and gave the family an undisclosed settlement.
Third, we believe that research and innovation make way for evidence-based policymaking and strategic investments. We want to see something like what has been achieved with gender budgeting, which requires ministries to report how much money they’ve spent on gender and empowerment. If our finance ministers pledge to ensure there is an air quality lens to budget planning across ministries, that would be the “aha” moment for us.
What breakthroughs has Our Common Air accomplished since your 2024 Bellagio Center convening?
That convening has been critical to the progress we’ve made so far. Having spent over 100 hours virtually brainstorming, it was important to move things forward for the final lap. We needed a physical gathering where we could argue, share ideas, and negotiate in a way that wouldn’t work virtually. The experience really brought the commissioners together, and we left aligned on a clear call to action.
Since our convening at the Bellagio Center in February 2024, I have seen the seeds we planted come to a full bloom. We launched our Call to Action in April 2025, our co-chairs and commissioners pushed their efforts across global events and summits, from Baku and Belem to Bangkok and Cartagena.
This fall, we’ve seen the world’s largest economies recognize that cleaner air is essential for health, prosperity and climate ambition. In October, the G20 Environment and Climate Ministers adopted the Cape Town Ministerial Declaration on Air Quality, which makes clean air a priority for member countries and commits them to taking concrete steps to reduce pollution. This was followed by a historic milestone in which the G20 leaders endorsed a landmark statement on air pollution. Our next move is to engage leading Heads of States who, in the light of the G20 Leaders Declaration, are all set to express their support for collaborative efforts on clean air. The journey from convenings to coordinated engagement shall continue.
Building the capacity for action requires strong relationships, alignment, and concerted engagement. Siddiqui believes those qualities can only be built collaboratively and that convening holds the key to doing so. “Convenings are incredibly powerful. When you bring leaders together in a place like the Bellagio Center, you can do things that seem impossible,” Siddiqui says. “If you’re stuck and need to get out of that bottleneck, think about the problem statement and hold a convening.”
Learn More:
- Watch Aafreen Siddiqui discuss her Big Bets Fellowship and her work with Our Common Air in this video from the Rockefeller Foundation.
- View Our Common Air’s Call to Action.
- Read the Cape Town Ministerial Declaration on Air Quality.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. The Rockefeller Foundation is not responsible for and does not endorse its content.