Community Case Study

What has been going on?

Following One Show coverage on BBC – greatest response was from communities outside of London, specifically Parish Councils. From this, a new audience was found. Communities have the same potential risks as large cities, e.g. heavy traffic, HGVs, construction sites, industry etc, but they do not have the political pull or financial support to do anything about it. This all lead to the creation of CommunityAir – a toolkit which supplies communities with the tools and resources they could need to run an air quality project in their area. This toolkit is freely available, and does not require purchasing an AirSensa device.

What’s is the CommunityAir Toolkit?

CommunityAir was set up by Deliver Change to provide communities with a range of tools to understand the problem, organise a response and take positive steps to press for the challenges in their area to be addressed.

CommunityAir is an online initiative and designed to be accessed and populated by communities themselves. We don’t want to be a bottleneck to your activities so everything can be set up and executed by you, but there is a team member available if you need guidance, particularly at the start. This toolkit, which is continually being updated to reflect feedback we get from those already using it, provides a guide for communities interested in running a CommunityAir project for their local area.

It focuses around the three key factors above and provides:

• Data monitoring – to collect and present localised data
• Citizen surveys – to engage the community and provide insight into support for the project
• Ideas and resources for involving schools
• Pointers on garnering human resources and financial resources, if required
• Templates for communication with a wide variety of groups, including media

Why should Communities get involved?

• Emissions measurement – AirSensa is in no way meant to replace statutory measurement, but it does offer a unique tool in terms of relatively accurate data at relatively low cost
• Education of local residents – it is still widely not recognised or considered in every day life
• Impact measurement – any interventions trialled can be monitored to see just how successful they were
• Data visualisations – data can be shown as a dashboard

Case Study: Iver

The parish of Iver is situated in the Colne Valley Park, in the south-east corner of Buckinghamshire, close to the M4 and M25 interchange. Iver got in contact with Deliver Change due to concerns about noise and air pollution levels throughout the village for reasons including:

• Proximity to M4 and M25 interchange
• Proximity to Heathrow Airport
• Proximity to 4-5 large industrial estates which puts nearly 1,500 HGVs and trailers on Iver’s unclassified roads daily
• Continual industrial development
• Large scale construction including CrossRail

Their aim is to make air pollution visible, using the data from AirSensa to educate residents and use against further planning applications, with the hope to lower emissions to a safer level and improve the quality of life for the residents.