Healthy Indoor Air in Schools: Every Breath Shapes Learning

Good morning, everybody. We're just waiting for a few more people to arrive and then we'll get started shortly. Thank you for your patience. As we're just getting settled, could I please ask all of the panel two speakers to come up and stand behind the panel one speakers for a quick family photo before we get started? So there should be eight people standing, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, we're missing one. Eight, perfect. Hang on, someone, come back here a bit so that we're spread out. Just make sure we're spread out. Put your mic down so they can see. Excellencies, distinguished guests, colleagues and friends, it's a great pleasure and honour to join you here today. My name is Dr. Bronwyn King. I'm a co-founder of Air Club and an honorary professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. I extend my sincere thanks to the governments of Montenegro, France and Eswatini for co-sponsoring this event. and to MEI and Brown University for partnering with Air Club to bring us together today. As a former oncologist and as a parent, I find it difficult to ignore a simple truth. One of the great paradoxes of modern society is that we devote enormous effort to protecting children from visible dangers. while paying remarkably little attention to one of the exposures that affects them every single day. We inspect playgrounds, we regulate food, we test drinking water, yet the air children breathe for hours each day remains, in most places, unmeasured and insufficiently protected. Poor indoor air harms children's health, learning, and potential. For some children, particularly those living with asthma or other health vulnerabilities, it can mean being pushed to the margins of school life. When a child misses school because of ill health, they lose more than a day of lessons. They lose opportunities to learn, grow and belong. Yet healthy indoor air remains an afterthought in too many schools. History will not ask whether we understood the risks facing our children. History will ask why, despite understanding those risks, we tolerated them for so long. Our first responsibility as parents, teachers and leaders is to keep children safe. We would never knowingly serve contaminated food or unsafe drinking water. Children deserve the same expectation when it comes to the air they breathe. Around the world, too many families are forced to choose between protecting their child's health or protecting their child's education. A healthy school should protect both. As a parent, I believe every part of school life should be safe. The classroom, the assembly hall, the school bus, every place where children gather to learn, grow and belong. And wherever a child attends school, whether in a rural village, a bustling city or a suburban community, families should be able to ask a simple question. Is the air my child breathes at school safe? That should not be a luxury. No child should be denied clean, healthy air because of where they live, the resources of their school or the circumstances of their family. Today, we call on governments, education systems and school leaders to recognise healthy indoor air as essential infrastructure for learning. We invite them to learn from and be inspired by the governments, schools, experts and leaders gathered here today who are demonstrating what is possible when children's health is placed at the centre of decision making. It is now my pleasure to welcome Dr Georgia Legoudas, co-founder of Air Club and senior fellow at Brown University Pandemic Centre, to introduce our distinguished speakers. Thank you.

Thank you, Dr Keane. It is wonderful to be with all of you today and to those of you online, what an amazing gathering to bring together the international community on this topic. And we see and welcome many of the familiar faces that joined last year. Again, thank you for the governments of France and Montenegro to kickstart this effort. I am delighted, your excellencies and distinguished guests, to welcome our first panel of very distinguished speakers. And first, I would like to welcome from Montenegro, His Excellency Vojislav Simun, the Minister of Health of Montenegro.

Thank you very much. Your Excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great honor to welcome you once again to the United Nations and to have the privilege of chairing this high-level side event for the second consecutive year. Last year, we gathered around a simple but urgent message. Healthy indoor air must become a global priority. Today, we return with an even clearer purpose, to turn that recognition into action. On behalf of the Government of Montenegro, I am pleased to welcome you to this year's high-level side event, Healthy Indoor Air in Schools, Every Breath Shapes Learning. I would also like to warmly acknowledge France and the Kingdom of Eswatini joining Montenegro in advancing this important agenda, and thank all governments, institutions, scientists and partners gathered here today. The air inside our schools is invisible, but its consequences are not. It affects children's health, their ability to concentrate, their attendance, their development, and ultimately their opportunity to learn. Children spend a significant part of their lives inside classrooms. Yet, indoor air quality remains too often overlooked in public healthcare strategies, education policies, and infrastructure planning. This must change. Countries have both the opportunity and the responsibility to bring indoor air quality into the center of public policy by measuring it, understanding it, establishing appropriate standards, investing in healthier buildings, and above all, acting on the evidence. For Montenegro, as a country constitutionally founded as an ecological state, we believe that environmental protection must be reflected in concrete policies that improve people's everyday lives. In close cooperation with civil society, including organizations such as MIAI, Montenegro is turning this commitment into concrete action. And this event is one of the results of that partnership. This year, our message is one step further. Recognition must be followed by implementation. We should leave this room with a shared understanding that indoor air quality belongs on the agenda of every government in ministries of health, education, environment, and infrastructure alike. When we improve the air in a classroom, we do more than improve a building. We protect a child's health. We strengthen their ability to learn, and we shape the future they are able to build. The air we breathe shapes learning. Let us make sure it also shapes better policy, stronger cooperation, and decisive action. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Minister, and thank you for your partnership and leadership from Montenegro. We are so delighted by recognizing that this is important to lead on and also bring in other nations and partnerships, so we appreciate that. A quick note, if any of you are having trouble hearing, there are earpieces if you'd like additional volume from any of the speakers, so just a note to all. Second, it is my absolute delight and pleasure to welcome distinguished guest and colleague and now friend over partnership over the past year, Mr. Jerome Vinebach, who is the Deputy Delegate for European and Internationals Affairs from the French Ministry of Health. The floor is yours.

Ladies and gentlemen, Prime Minister Spychig, Minister Mazia, Excellencies and dear colleagues. So, dear Bronwyn, it's a great pleasure to be with you here today in New York to discuss an issue that is both invisible and essential, the quality of the air we breathe inside our buildings. We spend nearly 90% of our time indoors, yet the air we breathe in these environments is still largely underestimated in our public policies, in our homes, workplaces, and healthcare facilities. But also and above all, in our schools, air quality has very tangible consequences for our health, our well-being and our ability to cope with crises, including pandemic and epidemic crises. I would like to warmly thank the Air Club Montenegro and Eswatini for organizing this event and for their commitment to this important issue. France is proud to co-sponsor this event alongside them. Indoor air quality is a health issue. It is also a matter of equality. More than 2 billion people worldwide are exposed to harmful indoor air pollution, and the most vulnerable populations are often the first to bear the consequences. Schools, therefore, deserve our full attention in this regard. Children spend a large part of their day at school and are particularly sensitive to certain pollutants. Poor indoor air quality can affect their comfort and health, contribute to the transmission of certain infectious diseases and impact learning conditions. We must therefore make indoor air quality in schools an integral part of our prevention policies. And we have the means to act through concrete, accessible and effective measures: ventilating rooms regularly, ensuring sufficient air renewal by monitoring CO2 levels, and properly maintaining ventilation systems. The COVID-19 pandemic reminded us of this. Ventilation is not a luxury. The quality of the indoor environment is an integral part of our public health policies and our preparedness for crises. Climate change further reinforces this need. Heat waves, wildfires, episodes of air pollution and extreme weather events such as those we have experienced in recent months are forcing us to rethink the resilience of our buildings and indoor environments. Taking action on indoor air quality therefore means acting both for health today and for resilience tomorrow. France has made this a priority. Also, there are still avenues for progress. As part of our fourth national health plan and environment plan, we have strengthened our action on indoor air quality. Since 2023, monitoring has been strengthened in nurseries, schools, middle schools, high schools, and leisure centers, in particularly through CO2 monitoring. And in 2024, we also established a national observatory for indoor environmental quality with the aim to strengthening our scientific expertise, improving our data, and better informing our public policies. But no country can meet this challenge alone. Air knows no borders, neither should our collective action. This is why France fully supports stronger international cooperation. to advance research, share data and best practices, move towards common standards and guidelines, and support countries that wish to strengthen their public policies. The launch of the Global Pledge for Indoor Air Quality at last year's United Nations General Assembly was an important milestone. France was proud to be among the first countries to support it, alongside Montenegro and many other partners. We have also continued to champion this issue through our 2026 G7 presidency. with our British colleague and international work on health. But political commitment only matters if it translates into action. This is why I call on our partners to move forward together around three priorities. The first one, we must make indoor air quality a fully integrated component of public health and prevention policies. particularly in schools and facilities serving the most vulnerable population. Second, we must strengthen our ability to jointly define the quality levels we expect for our indoor environments as well as the means to measure and achieve them based on science, data, and the sharing of best practices. And third, we must turn our international commitment into concrete cooperation, supporting countries and ensuring that indoor air quality remains firmly embedded into the multilateral health agenda. France stands ready to continue this work with you in our schools, hospitals, home, and workplace, We must be able to ensure environment that protect health. And indoor air must not be a privilege, it must become the norm. This is the challenge we must not take together. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Weinbach, for those inspiring words and for outlining France's historical actions over many years on this topic. And I think bringing to the forefront, there are ways to lead within a country, and we are excited for an opportunity for international collaboration to build upon those best practices and learn together. Thank you. Now it is my pleasure to introduce from the Kingdom of Eswatini, the Honorable Minister Savannah Mazia, the Minister of Information, Communications and Technology.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to observe all protocol. It's truly a great honor to join you today on behalf of the Kingdom of Eswatini for this vital conversation on healthy indoor air in schools. My thanks to the Government of Montenegro, the Government of France, the Montenegro Institute for Advanced Innovation, the Air Club, Brown University, and all our partners for bringing this critical issue to the global stage. Quality air is a human right. Quality air is not negotiable. So as we meet here one year after the inaugural UNGA Dialogue on Healthy Indoor Air, we must have the conversation about how do we enforce the issue of quality air. We are here today breathing air and being indoor, we hope that this air is quality air. The issue of quality air is a life and death issue. For a child, a school is more than a building. It's where they learn, develop their talents, discover science and technology, and begin to imagine their future. But it's also a place where they spend most of their day. Their ability to learn is shaped by the environment in which the learning is taking place. Their environment must be safe physically and also in ways we do not see, and that includes quality air. Healthy indoor air must therefore be seen as an investment in human capital. When we improve the conditions in which children learn, we invest in their health, their educational outcomes, and ultimately their future. And our societies are the better and the stronger for it. One of the challenges with indoor air is that we cannot always see the problem. A classroom may appear perfectly healthy, while the air inside carries inadequate ventilation, pollutants or airborne pathogens. This gives us an important lesson. What we cannot see must not become what we cannot measure and cannot make better. Technology gives us new possibilities. Affordable sensors can monitor air quality. Digital platforms can collect and analyze the data. That data can help schools identify risks and help governments determine where investment is most urgently needed. And this is where healthy indoor air connects directly with digital infrastructure and transformation. Digital transformation is not simply about putting government services online. It's about using technology, data, and innovation to improve people's lives. And therefore, very few places can be able to work without that collaboration. The principle is our children are our future and their lives are very important. For SRTEI, this conversation speaks directly to our commitment to science, technology, engineering and maths, as well as innovation. We must ensure that innovation moves beyond the laboratory and becomes a practical tool for solving problems in our communities. Healthy indoor air creates opportunities for our scientists to develop affordable monitoring technologies. for innovators to design locally appropriate solutions, and for our universities and technology sector to generate and use this data effectively. Most importantly, it creates opportunities for our young people around the world and in our communities. Students are able to create sensors and measure the air quality in their own classrooms, but also can be able to have those exported to other parts of the world. We simply must ensure that we act with urgency. We simply must ensure that we are able to bring other countries along. We must use technology to be able to advance this cause and be able to solve this problem. We live in a time and a place where quality air, quality food and quality living must be part of what we are able to offer ourselves as well as future generations. As the King of Eswatini, we are committing ourselves to this pledge, we are committing ourselves to ensure that we are part of the movement that ensures quality air is a human right and everybody has an experience no matter what their financial position. all their geographies. Excellencies, we are here to commit ourselves and to say with the African continent, we would like to be able to partner with you. We thank you for involving the Kingdom of Eswatini and for giving us the opportunity to be a partner. Excellencies and everybody here, ladies and gentlemen, we are saying that we are committing to our children, we are committing to our future, but most importantly, we're committing to the future of the world. As the kingdom, we are here with you and pledge that future sustainability. We thank you.

Thank you, Honorable Minister, and thank you for highlighting the opportunity to integrate education, technology, and recognizing your own leadership with education and science. And now we are so delighted to welcome your government as part of this international movement. And as today, we are excited to have an opportunity to sign the Global Pledge for Healthy Indoor Air. So if I might invite yourself, along with representatives from Montenegro and France, to join us for a signing ceremony. And as of today, with the Honorable Minister signing, this will mark the third nation, along with two other city governments, joining 315 organizations from 57 countries around the world. Please join us here. It was a bold task to sign a large blank place, but she has placed your mark, so thank you for that first step. And we will welcome additional organizations to sign at the end of today's session and delighted for that opportunity. It is now my pleasure to welcome another speaker, distinguished guest, Mr. Barry Gardner, who is a member of Parliament for Brent West from the UK Parliament. Mr. Gardner.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I am not Philip Barlow. Philip was the assistant coroner for inner South London. and it's from his coroner's report that I want to read to you. His report into the death of Ella Adu-Kisidebra was the first time that air pollution exposure had ever been cited as a cause of death after an inquest. Ella died at the age of nine. This is his words. Ella died at the age of nine. She had severe hypersecretory asthma. On 15 February, she had a further asthmatic episode at home and was taken to hospital, where she suffered a cardiac arrest from which she could not be resuscitated. Air pollution was a significant contributory factor. She was exposed to levels of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter in excess of World Health Organization guidelines." End of quote. Where does a child spend most of their waking hours? In school. Where does a child spend most of their time when not in school? At home. Both indoors. And indoor air can be five times more polluted than outdoor air. So it makes no sense for governments to be fixated on outdoor air pollution as the problem. We had to show passes to get into this building. Particulate matter, ultrafine particles, nitrogen dioxide, they don't carry passes. Pollution respects no threshold. And to these outdoor killers, you can add airborne viruses, mold, fungal spores, bacteria, because every building creates a climate of its own. Nowhere is this of greater consequence than in our schools, where poor ventilation often concentrates pollutants in stuffy classrooms. Our children drink about two liters of water every day, but they breathe 11,000 liters of air. A school would be closed down if it gave kids dirty water. Go figure. And it doesn't have to be like this. Montenegro already conducting air monitoring tests in their schools. In my own city, over 200 schools in London have air filters thanks to Mayor Sadiq Khan, who's invested 2.7 million to run pilot schemes and studies. We need to prove it works and is cost effective. We're building the evidence that enables schools, families, communities and institutions to take effective control. And events like this morning are part of that effort. So I want to congratulate the governments and all the colleagues on this panel for making this possible. In Britain, 200 people die each year from knife crime. There's an outrage. and we pass legislation. 2,000 people die in road traffic accidents. There's an outrage and we politicians pass legislation. Yet every year in my country, 30,000 people have their lives curtailed by air pollution. And yet we fail to pass laws that would change this. Ella was nine when she died. Today, she would be a young woman just graduating from university. Vuyiswapth, ministers, how foolish must we politicians be to squander our young talent in this way? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Gardner. Thank you for providing a narrative and a story that evokes emotions in all of us and inspires us to take further action. I'm next delighted to welcome a speaker from Montenegro. Ms. Marina Mijuskovic is the executive director of the Montenegrin Institute for Advanced Innovation and has been a leader in this field, excited to welcome Marina to the floor.

Thank you, Georgia. Excellencies, distinguished guests, and colleagues and friends, it is a privilege to welcome you today on behalf of MEAI to Healthy Air in School: Every Breath Shapes Learning, and to have another opportunity to discuss indoor air quality and why it deserves greater attention in environments where children learn and grow. At last year's UNGA side event, Healthy Indoor Air: A Global Call to Action, we came together to raise awareness and place indoor air quality more firmly on the public agenda. And today, I have to particularly be pleased to have France, the Kingdom of Eswatini, and Montenegro to come together and support this event. Our previous year shown us what meaningful action regarding the indoor air quality requires. It doesn't just require technology, it requires community, it requires evidence, technical capacity, cooperation with public institutions, and solutions that can work in the real conditions, in real schools. And this is the space which MIAI has chosen to work by bringing this together, science, technology, public policy, and implementation, and helping connect the people and institutions that are working on the different parts of the same challenge. For example, MIAI initiated AIRA, Initiative for the Healthy Indoor Air, which I would say came with this idea to create this platform, a platform where public institutions, where researchers, where people who care about the indoor air quality can come together, can speak together, and deliver the ideas and solutions regarding the challenge we are fighting. And MIAI decided that this work and efforts that we have to put in, it requires for this strong work chain. And we decided that we want to develop the devices. We wanted to develop technology capacity. Therefore, we have engineering teams in Montenegro that create very important open source. devices, monitoring and cleaning devices, which will be used for many causes. For example, we have today with us our education educators who are conducting more than 100 workshops within the schools in Montenegro, raising awareness on indoor air quality. So we have children, we have parents and teachers who are aware of the problem. Next to that, we are conducting educations so that data can be understood in order for teachers to understand why they need to open the window between the classes. Why do we need to maybe turn on the air cleaners once we see that we get pollution from the outdoors and from those exact windows? And we came to the idea that we need to educate not just students in schools, we need to educate students in the universities to be able to be the part of this idea tomorrow. we decided that we need to educate parents in order to show them what time do their children spend in the pollutant area. Then we wanted to also educate professional audiences to show them what these data show do to our children and then to move also our researchers and the public institution to work on the policies that will make a full framework for our idea to bring the indoor air quality to our classrooms. And I would just highlight our ERA initiative for the healthy indoor air aims to cover with healthy air with air monitors and air cleaners every school in Montenegro. And as last Tunga was our starting point and was our enormous networking point that helped us to gather an amazing people that we will have today. I believe that this today event will be the same and in the year it will become a tradition for us, not just for MEAI, but every other NGO, every other entity that wants to join us to fight indoor air quality issues. Thank you and your time.

Thank you, Marina. And so delighted to hear about the progress in Montenegro and the opportunity to collaborate. And I think many in the audience and online are eager to be a part of both the technological development and bringing this to classrooms in Montenegro and beyond. Thank you. Next, it is my pleasure to welcome Mr. Jason Mazzella from Air Cleaning Technologies of Intercept. Jason, over to you.

Hello, friends, colleagues, and distinguished guests. First, thank you to the organizers and all participants for the opportunity to contribute to this important conversation on behalf of Intercept. Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative launched earlier this year with a long-term mission of putting common respiratory viruses on a path to elimination. We're grateful to be supported in this mission by Stripe, Anthropic, Flu Lab, the OpenAI Foundation, among others. We'll pursue our mission by catalyzing the development and deployment of two technologies, broad spectrum pharmaceutical preventatives and air cleaning technology. While much of our fund will go towards drug development, even in the most optimistic case, scale adoption of air cleaning technologies is required to reduce the burden of respiratory infections in both peacetime and emergency situations. Schools are core to this mission because addressing them can lower the burden of respiratory infections on the entire community. Because infections in schools have a uniquely high potential for amplified community spread, protecting kids protects everyone around them. Some estimate that over half of household respiratory infections are introduced through school and childcare. To bring about these benefits, we must drive awareness of the opportunity, create durable demand signals for commercial technologies, and bolster the evidence for the effectiveness, economic return on investment, and safety of deploying these products. Intercept plans to fund research that demonstrates how clean air reliably reduces infections in real-world settings, such as schools. And in parallel, we'll accelerate air cleaning technology deployment with adopters across multiple segments. We hope to create the commercial conditions and low friction playbooks needed for scale deployment and the policy incentivizing it to succeed. We're excited to partner with so many in this room advancing this cause already to help move faster and increase the scale of our shared impact. A century ago, waterborne diseases levied similar costs to those posed by respiratory viruses like the common cold and influenza today, endemic, periodically epidemic, and widely accepted as an inevitable feature of human life. Since the turn of the 20th century, pharmaceutical advances and clean water infrastructure made those waterborne diseases significantly rarer in many parts of the world in a matter of decades. We believe that with enough collaboration, funding, and focus, These problems are tractable, and we can do the same for respiratory infections in schools and beyond. Thank you.

Thank you, Jason. And excited for the opportunity to jumpstart additional research in this space and partner with new philanthropic funding coming in. So, thank you for your leadership. Finally, I am delighted to welcome Ms. Rachel Hodgdon, the President and CEO of the International WELL Building Institute.

Colleagues, friends, I keep coming back to one word today, hope. We have heard from inspiring speakers about the hope for a world in which everyone, no matter who they are or where they live, has access to healthy indoor air. And what we are witnessing is more than momentum. It is a growing belief that we are rapidly approaching a global tipping point. Last year, we came together around the Global Pledge for Healthy Indoor Air, and two days ago, the Global Commission launched the Global Framework for Action, a game plan for turning the fundamental human right of healthy indoor air into a reality. And this gathering is another reason for hope. Government leaders, school districts, philanthropy, NGOs, industry, and academia. all coming together to stand up for our schools, to stand up for our children. Because when we talk about indoor air in schools, we are not talking about air for its own sake. Healthy air is an entry point. Health is the purpose. At IWBI, our singular focus is advancing a health-first agenda for the places and spaces where we live our lives. And nowhere is that more important than in our schools. This summer, IWBI joined four other national organizations to host our Healthy School Summit, where we announced a health first agenda for America's schools. And that word first matters. For too long, health has been something important, but rarely urgent, something that can wait. But our children cannot wait. I remember talking to a school district leader in West Virginia who told me about a little girl who, due to poor indoor air quality, was having asthma attacks Monday through Friday. Her family was finally forced to pull her out of school and move her to another district simply so that she could be well enough to learn. For that little girl, this wasn't a facilities problem. This wasn't a line item in a capital budget. It was her life. And that's what urgency looks like. For too many students and educators, health has been deferred to the next budget, the next capital plan, the next year. But when health is delayed, health is denied. We must also make our schools energy efficient, sustainable, and resilient. Those goals matter enormously. But when it comes to our children, they are the means. and not the ultimate measure of success. A school can meet an energy target and still fail a child who is struggling to breathe. The ultimate measure is whether that building supports the health, well-being, and learning of the people inside it. The global framework gives us a path from aspiration to action. Now we need that same health-first commitment for schools around the world. No child should have to trade their health for an education. So today, let's make and keep one simple promise to every child. Your health and well-being comes first.

Thank you. Thank you, Rachel, and thank you for bringing it to the forefront of this comes first. And also thank you for bringing the buildings community and the infrastructure community to this conversation. I'd like to request all of you to help me warmly thank the speakers from today and in particular government leaders. We thank you for your leadership, your comments and partnership moving forward. And now we would like to welcome our second panel of speakers to join us and thank you all. You may take your seats and I'll pass over to Dr. King. Thank you.

Je. Thank you, everybody. I'm delighted to introduce panel two. The nameplates will all be changed in a moment. So don't worry about that. That's happening. But I'm very excited to build on the really important reflections that we heard during the first panel. And so for panel two, I'm pleased to welcome Trina Marsal, Chief of Operations at Denver Public Schools, to deliver her remarks. Trina, the floor is yours.

To distinguished guests, colleagues and friends, it's an honor to be here today. I'm Trina Marcel, chief of operations for Denver Public Schools. We talk about what shapes education, but today I'm focused on something fundamental, the air our students and staff breathe. Indoor air quality is a public health crisis, an educational equity imperative, and a climate resilience necessity. In Denver Public Schools, we believe clean air should never depend on a school's age, zip code, or community wealth. Aging facilities create unequal environmental conditions. Our strategy? We shifted our mindset from reacting to equipment failures to proactively monitoring conditions and intervening early. Using a facility condition assessment and an equity index, we directed capital investments to our highest need facilities first. As we evaluated the work, we understood this is not about an HVAC project, it's an integrated ecosystem. 11.53 megawatts of solar has been installed. We prioritize source reduction, replacing leaking roofs to prevent mold, eliminating toxic cleaning chemicals, and utilizing integrated pest management. We prioritize filtration and operations, upgrading to MERV 8 and 13 filters, tuning dampeners, and empowering teams to shift from reacting to proactive system management. We've employed over 6,000 air purification units district-wide. We believe that decarbonization and climate resilience is foundational to our success. Removing fossil fuels, combustion eliminates indoor pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide. Wildfire smoke and high ozone are becoming annual occurrences in Denver. Our digital controls network allows facilities teams to dynamically balance fresh air intake and recirculated filters air during heavy smoke days while heat pumps provide dual heating and cooling to prevent heat dismissals we've even taken clean air Outdoors with Colorado's largest Fleet of 28 electric buses our data Journey didn't start there we manage what we measure IQ sensors act as our monitoring tool for air quality particulates Our data journey started in 2022 with a 10% IAQ sensor pilot with 800 sensors. Today, we have 100% classroom coverage with over 5,000 indoor air quality sensors, allowing us to make real-time data-driven decisions utilizing a dashboard. While technology and infrastructure form the backbone of this initiative, The heartbeat of our progress comes from student voice and advocacy. Denver Public Schools has a five year climate action plan that was not created in a vacuum by administrators. It was pushed forward by student activism. Student leaders organized, drafted formal board resolutions, and demanded clear, clean greenhouse gas reduction targets and healthier school environments. Our superintendent and our board heard our students. Through partnerships, students have engaged in hands-on, student-led indoor air quality and climate monitoring projects that led this year to over 400 students graduating with a Seal of Climate Literacy diploma. We also had 177 students last year who graduated with a Seal of Climate Literacy diploma. That's over 577 new climate champions ready to lead change. Healthy air in our schools is not a luxury or an afterthought. It's a prerequisite for learning. Let's make healthy indoor air quality a standard, an essential investment in educational equity and student health. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Trina. We're so grateful for your insights and your incredible commitment to this work. And I love your story of engaging the students, listening to the students, empowering the students so that they become the champions for the future. So it's a great lesson for us all. Let us continue the conversation in Colorado by welcoming Professor Mark Hernandez from the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, Mark.

Thank you for inviting me here, your excellency's distinguished guests, my colleagues and my neighbors. On behalf of the faculty, staff, and students of our mountain state of Colorado, I can't tell you how excited I am to be here. I was at the kickoff event, and at that time, I wasn't sanctioned to sign, and now I am, so I'm very excited about that. My students call this a moment and I'm at a moment in this classroom, this new classroom. A beginning for better classrooms for tomorrow for children, the children that we've heard some tough stories about and the children that we've had some wonderful stories about. I'd like to share a little rhyme that some of the children shared with me when I was working in their schools, putting in the monitors that we were talking about. And it was on a snowy Colorado day, and one of the children came up to me and said, here we share indoor air. And, you know, that stuck with me. I love it. Children, it's why we're here. It's why we do what we do. I'm an educator for that reason, to help young people make this world a better place. We heard earlier this reminder that many of us, well, at least some of us, have choices about the water we breathe. Some of us get to choose the food we eat. We're lucky enough to do that, but not the air we breathe. The air we share, the air we must share, we don't have a choice in that. And now the children know we care. So I want to thank the Air Club leadership for their organizational skill in building this critical mass. And that's what my students call a moment. Finally, we're here. I've been in this field for 30 years waiting for this critical mass to amount, and we're here. I don't think a lot of the children I run into in the schools know what the United Nation is. And eventually they will, but right now they're here to learn. They're here and they have no choice to be in those classrooms and we, it's our charter to make that place a good place for them to do that. So this is the charter I signed up for and will sign and It's a professional priority. It'll be for me for the rest of my life. In Colorado, I've been in more than 300 schools over the last 30 years, crawling through ventilation systems, diagnosing problems, and teaching students to do so. I'm a civil engineer, and thanks to the story that you heard, I'm in a lot less schools. I was part of the pilot that she just mentioned, the early pilot to get those monitors in there. And it was my students who actually executed that pilot. And now some of them work for your district. So I'm very proud of that. So I want to thank this organization for bringing us all together. I'm a professor of civil engineering. I'm not a minister or a CEO. or a philanthropist, and I am chartered to teach the civil engineers at the University of Colorado sustainability. I teach the sustainability principles course, and there's three pillars, environment, the science, economics, the ROI that we heard about, and then this one, this most important one, this social one, where we get together and the decision makers make the choice for our students. We can afford it. I've put hundreds, thousands of air filters in classrooms. The cost is a cup of coffee. We've put air monitors in, we've changed things. The cost is less than the price of a textbook. We can do it. The ROI is there. And I'm proud to be part of this effort. Thank you.

Many thanks, Mark, for your thoughtful words and your decades and decades of efforts. And along with all of your wonderful engineering teaching, I hope you'll be able to teach your students what the UN is now that you've had your moment here on stage. I'm now delighted to introduce Anisa Hemming, Director, Center for Green Schools from the US Green Building Council to share her perspectives.

Thank you, distinguished colleagues. Every single day, one in eight people on this planet walks through a school door. Most of them are children. And when they walk in, they trust us without a thought to have made sure the air inside is safe to breathe. For 16 years, the Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council has worked on that promise. And I can tell you, in too many places, it is not being kept. My own roots in this work started in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In my role helping the school district rebuild, I walked schools with visible mildew and leaks being caught in buckets. And still, when discussing priorities for the new school buildings, I got questions about why we weren't just focused on energy efficiency. Leaders needed basic information about the legacy of sick building syndrome, as well as recent healthy building science, and they needed a person to help them connect the dots between what is good for people, what's good for the planet, and what's good for financial sustainability. Nearly 100,000 public schools across America manage 7 1/2 billion square feet of space, much of it aging and underfunded. Into that landscape has come wildfire smoke, new respiratory illnesses, And a wave of new community hopes and expectations that stretched districts are struggling to meet. A green school is built on three commitments to reduce its environmental footprint, to teach the next generation, to build a sustainable world. And first among these, because it cannot wait to protect the health of everyone inside it. Clean air, safe water, daylight. These are not amenities. They are baseline conditions for a child to learn and a teacher to teach. So today I want to tell you what 53 people are doing about it. Just this week, we're welcoming 53 school system leaders from 25 states in the US into our newest school air quality fellowship. They join the hundreds of professionals we are already training, reaching nearly 10 million students. These new fellows come from districts as small as La Honda Pescadero, California, with 300 students, and as large as the school district of Philadelphia, serving 198,000. Together, the fellows districts educate more than 2 million children. 92% serve communities eligible for Title I support. These are not the districts with the most resources. No, they have just decided that the air their students breathe is a non-negotiable. Over the next nine months, these fellows will not just learn about indoor air quality, they will write it into policy, into practice, formalizing plans built to outlast any one superintendent or one budget cycle or one crisis. A child's right to breathe clean air should never depend on their zip code, their district's tax base, or the age of their school's HVAC system. It should simply be true everywhere for everyone. 53 leaders started work on that this month. 2 million students will feel it, and every one of us in this room has a part to play. The air our children breathe is not a side issue in the work of building a sustainable world. It is the first, most basic promise a school makes to a child. Let's help every school on Earth keep it. Thank you.

Thank you, Anisa, for your compelling remarks and your incredible dedication to this topic. Our next speaker brings a unique energy and unwavering commitment to making things happen. It's my privilege to introduce David Carroll, Director, Inspired Air Fund, Renaissance Philanthropy. David.

Excellencies, distinguished guests, colleagues. If you walk into a data center today, you might notice that the air inside is pristine. When particles settle on a circuit board, they trap heat, clog fans, and can even conduct enough electricity to short a circuit. Dirty air is bad for chip health and artificial intelligence, so we make sure the air chips breathe is cleaned meticulously. And we know that poor air quality is bad for human health too, especially for kids. 20 human health and education, especially for kids. A 2024 meta analysis of studies across three continents found that exposure to fine particulate matter is associated with decline in children's IQ scores. Studies in China and Israël find worse performance on test scores during polluted days. Trials from Italy to England find significant improvements in attendance when you filter the air in classrooms. which we know translates to learning gains. But despite this and more evidence, we neither monitor nor clean the air in our schools anywhere near as well as we do in our data centers. And by the way, as we filter the air inside those facilities to keep chips running at peak performance, we're actively degrading the air that kids are breathing in nearby schools. The gas turbines and diesel engines powering data centers are themselves a major source of air pollution. We are trading off human intelligence and potential for artificial intelligence. There are so many reasons to clean the air in schools. We should clean the air in schools because it helps kids perform better and live up to their fullest potential. We should clean the air in schools because it reduces children's exposure to pollutants widely known to cause asthma, multiple types of cancer, and even eventually dementia. And I'll leave you today with one final reason. We should do it because it makes our society more resilient to airborne disease and to pandemics. In addition to climate change making zoonotic spillovers more likely, Unfortunately, it no longer seems so far-fetched that advanced AI could increase the risk of pandemics, especially airborne ones, something biosecurity experts have been warning about for years. Scientists are already using AI to create novel synthetic viruses, and major labs have recently reported user attempts to make viruses more transmissible. It is all the more tragic then that amidst this AI boom, we have not yet made our society resilient to pandemics, including the new ones that AI itself might help bring about. Let's establish measurable health-based standards for air quality in schools, set deadlines for meeting them, and fund the ventilation, filtration, and maintenance those standards entail, starting with the schools facing the greatest risks and the fewest resources. We know clean air matters enough to protect our computer chips. Our children deserve at least the same care.

Thank you, David. Your energy and vision are helping shape the future of this field, and we really thank you for sharing that with us this morning. Next, we are fortunate to have with us today, all the way from New Zealand, Dr Ian Longley, director, the Air Quality Collective. Ian, the floor is yours.

Kia ora koutou. You give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. You teach him how to fish and you feed him for life. In the forgotten spaces and cupboards of thousands of New Zealand classrooms lie the remains of portable air cleaners. They were bought by the Government when we decided that we were no longer going to use lockdowns to manage every new outbreak of Covid. At the same time, we issued some advice to schools, which was: while you are waiting for your air filter to arrive, please get your teachers to open the windows more. In the cold alpine regions of New Zealand, fresh air means freezing air. A group of schools in the Otago region reached out to the local media to vent their frustrations. Who on earth is the idiot who comes up with this guidance? Well, as the leader of the nation's air quality research program at the time, that idiot was me. So the filters arrived and teachers and children kept on getting sick. And then COVID was suppressed, went away, some people felt, and teachers and children still kept getting sick. We have heard about air filters. It was not the fault of the air filters. They are a fantastic technology. The problem was that they were not fully understood. Because they were not fully understood, they were not being used effectively or, in some cases, at all. They were so completely tied and associated with Covid that many teachers did not realise that they also provided protection against the flu, bushfire smoke, airborne allergens and so on. Basically, we had given them a fish, but we hadn't taught them how to fish, which is kind of ironic considering that schools are in the business of teaching and learning. Those cold schools in Otago, we gave them some additional advice. We said, you know, you can change your heating protocols and you can mitigate some of the problems of heat loss, but hey, don't trust our word for it. We sent out air monitors and told teachers, prove it for yourselves. and thousands of teachers did and had their own personal eureka moment. So in the years since, I started to take a different look at this approach. With colleagues, I've developed an air quality discovery program, a training program for children aged seven years old and upwards. I don't instruct them on how to get clean air. What I do is I give them permission to experiment, to trial and error, supported by sensor feedback and other feedback such as the opportunity to compete against their fellow classmates in different classrooms. And where better to trial this but in those cold Otago classrooms that have struggled so much with my advice to ventilate. So at first the children of course got it wrong, they over ventilated and yes they froze their classrooms. And what better teacher than your own mistakes. So through trial and error and measurement, they gained mastery and ownership of the problem. By mid-winter, they had got top marks. They could get perfect, excellent air quality in a warm classroom without interrupting with the normal function of the class. But they didn't stop there. They then wanted to teach their fellow classmates in other classrooms what they learned and train them. And then they held an exhibition and brought their parents and family friends in to turn the school into a community hub of learning. They were then invited to present the programme to their regional councillors, who advocated for a roll-out of the programme. If you give a child clean air in their classroom, you protect them for a few hours a day. If you teach them how to achieve clean air, you gift them, their families and their communities with a clean air culture that takes on a life of its own. It is cheap. It's fast. You can start today. It's fun, but most of all, it's effective. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Ian, for showing us what's possible when you engage the full school ecosystem. And I love your comment, clean. You established a clean air culture. I think it's a brilliant inspirational story and I hope everybody can take home a little bit of hope knowing that there's people all over the world trying their very best to improve on this big challenge. Next up from my home city of Melbourne, Australia, it's now an honour to introduce Dr. Claire Walter from Breathe Melbourne Project, Deakin Lifespan Institute. Over to you, Claire.

Thanks, Bronwyn. Distinguished guests, colleagues and friends, 14 years ago I was an oncology pharmacist on maternity leave, searching for a childcare centre for my daughter Emma. The only spot I could find was 10 metres from a major eight-lane road. The same year, diesel exhaust was categorised as a class 1 carcinogen. And back in the clinics at work, I began to notice that one in three of the lung cancer patients I was seeing were classed as never smokers. When I raised concerns about the air near Emma's centre, a government scientist visited me and assured me that it was safe. Turns out that the safety assurance was based on just two monitors across a city of 5 million, both in the middle of parks. When I worked this out, we moved. Emma's wheeze disappeared. But I couldn't forget what I had learned. Firstly, the term air quality hides air pollution. Air quality can be classed as good or safe, but air pollution is never good at any level. Secondly, children are essentially invisible in policy decisions. Despite being the most vulnerable group, their health is rarely quantified in project approvals. And finally, this is a wicked problem. We have vested interests and political short-termism thriving in an environment of low public awareness. Children's health is being mortgaged for political and corporate gain. Idle Off started with myself and three other concerned parents advocating for vehicles to turn their engines off outside of schools. It wasn't novel. In fact, it was inspired by programs right here in the US. Deakin University then stepped in to formally pilot the program in two Melbourne schools with the Breathe Melbourne research group. We learned that a couple of simple lessons embedded into the school curriculum made significant differences in parents' behavior in terms of idling their vehicles outside. And most importantly, it improved children's sense of agency without adding to their anxiety. From this, a coalition formed between Deakin, the University of Melbourne, and Doctors for the Environment. The latter group is still managing an ongoing campaign with another group called Parents for Climate. So after a decade, momentum is finally building at a grassroots level. This is also being helped by international evidence, most recently from London's low emission zones. But in Australia, a key barrier remains, low public awareness. We have a dominant narrative of good air quality in our country, which breeds complacency about all sources of pollution. What most people don't realise is that outdoor pollution doesn't stay outside. It infiltrates classrooms and makes up to two thirds of the pollution children are breathing at their desks. And the harm doesn't stop at the lungs. It creates systemic inflammation and, as you've already heard, reaches the brain, affecting cognition, concentration, and children's ability to learn. Idle Off isn't just about idling. It's about shifting how we see the air. indoors and outdoors, as one continuous risk to our children's health. Better air isn't just for your asthma attacks. It's better focus, better learning, and smarter children, which is what we're going to need for the future. Thank you.

Thank you for your leadership, Clare, and your extraordinary persistence over a long period of time, and we really hope that now that we are undoubtedly on a way to an unstoppable momentum in Australia. We now turn to Achim Helg, who is the founder and CEO of Air Gradient to share his insights.

Thank you. In northern Thailand, where I live, schools face a difficult choice during the burning season. Open the windows and pollution comes in, close them and classrooms become hot and poorly ventilated. I founded AirGradient to make air quality monitoring affordable and open source. We recently established the Open Air Foundation to bring this work to more communities that have the fewest resources. In Lao PDR, we helped UNICEF deploy 150 air quality monitors in schools. They chose open solutions to build local capacity, avoid vendor lock-in, and keep systems connected. Today, That data is helping shape national air quality standards, and UNICEF is building a forecasting model for early warnings. Through air monitor kits, we also brought monitor assembly into schools' learning activities. Students build a device, see the measurements, and begin asking questions. Why did pollution rise? What happens when we open windows? What can we change? As a result, children become active participants in improving their environment. This is why open source matters beyond the technology. Public investment should leave behind knowledge and capabilities that communities can keep using, maintain, and adapt to their specific needs. For me, the critical path forward has three parts. First, Establish an integrated practical framework for assessing indoor and outdoor air. It must work in naturally ventilated classrooms in Laos, as well as an air-conditioned school here in New York. This is something we started working on together with the Montenegrin Institute of Advanced Innovation, AirLab, and the UNDP Global Centre in Singapore. Second, connect every measurement to an action. Teachers need clear guidance, resources, and someone responsible for helping them respond. A dashboard alone does not improve the air. Better ventilation and filtration and behavior change do. Third, fund the whole journey, monitoring, improvements, maintenance, and checking whether those improvements worked. We need sustained support beyond the initial pilot, and we need to create more evidence about the positive health effects of cleaner air to unlock more investments. My invitation to governments, funders, and partners here is simple. Let us build the public infrastructure that makes healthy school air achievable everywhere. Thank you.

Thank you, Akim, for your valuable contributions, and we're very grateful for your dedication to the topic. To conclude our speaker lineup today, I'd like to warmly invite Skandan Ananthasankar, visiting fellow, Pandemic Center, Brown University School of Public Health, to present his hot off the press research. Over to you, Skandan.

Thank you so much. Excellencies, distinguished guests, colleagues, and friends, I am honored to join you today. We have heard today from many speakers who have talked about how healthy indoor air can provide defenses against many societal challenges at the same time. It can be a defense against pandemics and wildfires while improving everyday student health and performance. It is one of the most cost-effective interventions that a government can make. However, many governments don't have a good roadmap or a unifying framework for governing indoor air quality policy. We have heard today from innovators who are advancing policies in their own jurisdictions, but oftentimes these lessons and learnings don't exist in one place. That is why we are honored today to launch the Global Indoor Air Quality Policy Database as a resource for what policy actions governments can take, what policy actions governments have taken before, and what are lessons worth replicating and learning from. The database catalogs 253 policies across 53 countries and offers policymakers, advocates, and researchers a tool to track, evaluate, and learn from what are the innovations happening around the world. A key finding from the database is that momentum is building, with 42% of all policies in the database enacted since 2020. showing just how much governments care about healthy indoor air to address pandemic and climate risks. However, there's still work to be done. A lot -- one of the -- another key finding for the database is that legal force is still uneven. A lot of the legally binding indoor air quality policies fall within workplace safety, building codes, and energy regulation, but health-based standards that cover the health of occupants and buildings is still lacking. That is why the database also is accompanied by recommendations that governments can take. A few key recommendations include designating a clear government lead who is in charge of indoor air quality. Only eight of the 53 countries in the database have a clear government lead for indoor air quality. A second key recommendation is to prioritize schools as a high priority sector for improving indoor air quality. Only 25 of the 253 policies in the entire database is related to education. And finally, to develop health-based rigorous indoor air quality standards that cover multiple settings and multiple pollutants. This database is intended as a version one, and we welcome collaboration from those in the room and those that are watching online. We hope that this database can be a continuing resource and a living resource that provides a practical roadmap for healthy indoor air as a fundamental right. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Skandan, for your excellent research that will help strengthen the evidence base to really drive more momentum across the world. That concludes our speaking lineup for this morning. And obviously, we have heard from a remarkable suite of speakers. Their expertise, insights, and dedication are truly helping to advance a healthier future for us all and for communities all around the world. So please join me in thanking them for their excellent contributions. I'd now like to invite Dr. Georgia Lagoudis back to the stage to offer some closing remarks, but before I do, I'd like to take this moment to thank Georgia, an outstanding colleague who has stood alongside me at seven international events in four continents in just the past year, helping elevate healthy indoor air onto the global stage exactly where it belongs. So thank you, Georgia.

Thank you, Bronwyn.

And as you can see, we had so many excellent speakers here doing a bit of musical chairs. I must say, to counter Dr. King's point, we were at an event yesterday that she had an opportunity to speak at, and sometimes I find myself sitting in amazement from the powerful words that Bronwyn is able to bring to decision makers, to leaders and storytellers, and it's been just a pleasure and joy and such a learning opportunity. over the past year at this global stage, learning from her and being a partner in this. And I think as all of you feel the energy of Air Club, so much of it has been from this starting spark that Bronwyn has helped bring to this effort. So I'd like to offer some closing remarks and then we can wrap up for today. But to build off of the comments we've heard today, as well as from all of the government leaders, I want to share how excited I am about the possibilities and the change ahead. We have heard about real progress, real commitment, and real opportunities for partnership. And if we take one thing from today, let it be this. that what we heard is not a collection of isolated projects. Really, this is a movement. And as Scandan has been able to outline, it is moving faster than many of us realize. And we can truly feel this pace of change. This pace of change is unmistakable. And the opportunity for this to grow amongst not just the United States, Europe, we now have representatives from Africa and others to be partners together. I want to offer a personal perspective. I am a bioengineer by training, and I spent many years in the lab working on very tricky, challenging topics. I was working on editing the DNA, engineering cells, working with developing cancer therapeutics, very challenging things. And as I've transitioned to work in public health policy and now am dedicated to this effort on clean indoor air, I am struck. by how simple the solutions are for clean air, especially clean air in classrooms. These are filters and fans and boxes and simple technology. We've had these technologies since the 1940s. David has outlined we are using some of this for some of the most advanced chip development systems, and yet we don't have these in the classrooms of our children. So, as Barry has also outlined, this is merely a will to act is what is needed. We have to decide it's a social imperative that we as a society value enough to put dollars and effort and resources behind this. This is not a technological problem, it is a societal problem. And for all of us, I think it is fair to say we believe that the 1.4 billion children in the world deserve to breathe healthy air. This is for their brains, this is for their bodies, and this is for the future health of our world and climate resilience and beyond. And I'd like to close by saying, as others have outlined, that clean water was a prior public health triumph of the century before. Safe food and cleaner outdoor air was something we advanced this past century. And the air inside where children breathe is the challenge that we must finish and address next. So to all of you, to every government, to every leader, to those online listening, we welcome you to join this movement, to join Air Club, to help us bring healthy indoor air. And as Bronwyn outlined, to ensure that this is essential infrastructure for learning. Let's build it together. So finally, I'd like to now mark the next step to say that we are delighted to welcome a new community of members to be part of the Global Pledge for Healthy Indoor Air. We have 35 additional signatories that are joining today, and this now reaches the milestone of 315 organizations from 57 countries around the world. and delighted to add on to the signature from the Honorable Minister from the Kingdom of Eswatini for today. So with that, I would like to close our program for today, invite representatives to join up along the side of the room. We will have VIPs shake your hand after signing the pledge. And additionally, we invite all of you to join us at a reception following this starting at 10 a.m. in Ophelia's Lounge. And to close, I must say this is a room of hope and inspiration. Thank you all for being part of this today. Okay, so now representatives, please join us where ScanDan is on the side. We'd love to welcome you to join the signing of the pledge. So all please line up.