A Message For Earth Day 2024

Growing up, I was always interested in our planet, our wildlife and the natural world.

I watched hours of David Attenborough documentaries, devoured books about our animal kingdom and participated in numerous Earth Day events through elementary, middle and high school.

When Nathan Roestandy and Istarted Nafas - Air Quality Solutions nearly four years ago - this interest became a mission. A mission to turn the world that we live in into a better place.

After thousands of hours of work, reading hundreds of papers on atmospheric science, public health and our built environment, meeting with some of the world’s top scientists, attending and speaking at air pollution conferences, guest lecturing at Universities and interacting with thousands of people on social media, I’ve developed my own perspective on people and the planet - one that’s both realistic with a splash of optimism.

On my 4th Earth Day as part of this mission, I wanted to share a few personal notes from the journey so far.

It’s Not Urgent Till Someone You Know Dies

For the most part, human brains are wired to prioritise comfort and safety. In his book “Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change” George Marshall explores the intricacies behind humanity’s perspectives on climate change. One striking thought - we don’t take notice of such things until it hurts us the most.

Remember COVID? It wasn’t a big deal initially, but then the people around us started dying. And suddenly it became a personal urgency.

In both the UK and US, the urgency around solving air pollution was accelerated through tragedies with thousands of deaths - The London Smog in 1962 and New York Smog in 1966.

The crazy thing is that an estimated 10,000,000 people a year die from air pollution - but because it’s not our family or friends, that number stays that. Just a very large number.

Simplifying Complexity is…Complex

I remember very vividly my college marketing professor highlighting - “People see around 5,000 marketing messages a day”. Today, that number is closer to 10,000.

Ironically, we have more knowledge available to us than any other generation, yet it’s clouded within more noise than ever. Billions of people are watching and creating hundreds of millions of pieces of content every single day.

In this context, facts no longer matter, it’s the narrative that does. Again, George Marshall explained this “when non-experts make sense of complex technical issues, they make their decisions based on the quality of the story vs quality of information - narrative fidelity.”

We must reframe our understanding of how to explain scientific concepts as compelling stories - and inject the same content creation strategies that personal branding experts have been highlighting.

One of my favorite scientific storytellers is Big Manny (Check him out on Tiktok as big.manny1)

Nobody Believes You Until They Do

I’ve heard the word “no” so much it’s actually lost its meaning to me - to funding, collaborations, meetings, partnerships.

I’ve been told we don’t have an air pollution problem, that science is boring, that nobody cares, that the TAM is too small.

At the same time, the WHO has labeled air pollution as the single greatest environmental threat to human life. The World Bank estimates that air pollution costs the global economy $8 Trillion each year - this is more than the entire yearly GDP of Japan ($4.2T) and India ($3.3T) combined or Germany ($4.1T), South Korea ($1.6T), Indonesia ($1.3T) and Saudi Arabia ($1.0T) combined.

Until today, the Nafas app has been accessed millions of times by hundreds of thousands of people all over Indonesia, many of whom started as non-believers. Indoor Clean Air Zones now cover over 130,000 square meters in Jakarta, Indonesia providing healthy air and data to almost 20,000 people including hundreds of pre-school children.

As more and more people believe, there is only one hope - that we can be faster to enable change before our own London Smog or New York Smog disasters happen.

And as we get bombarded each day with more images of our planet in strife - floods in Dubai, earthquakes in Taiwan, volcanoes in Indonesia, heatwaves in Singapore - I’m still realistically optimistic.

I'm looking forward to the thousands more hours of work, hundreds more scientific papers, meetings, conferences, lectures and more needed to keep building for this mission.

I hope you are too.

Happy Earth Day ??.

Sources:

1. https://www.who.int/news/item/04-04-2022-billions-of-people-still-breathe-unhealthy-air-new-who-data
2. https://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/abs/10.1596/978-1-4648-1816-5
3. https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Even-Think-About-Climate/dp/163286102X