This American mayor stepped up to fight air pollution – yours can too
When he first ran for mayor of Cleveland in 2021, Justin Bibb was virtually unknown. A political newcomer, early polls revealed that only about 5% of the city’s residents even knew his name.
To change that, Bibb, a former nonprofit executive, campaigned relentlessly — promising to work on public safety, modernize city hall and put Cleveland “back on the national map.” He’d often knock on doors to deliver his pitch himself.
One of those doorstep conversations stuck with him.
A mother living on Cleveland’s southeast side — a primarily Black neighborhood — told him that the air pollution there was so bad, her son had developed asthma and struggled to breathe.
Bibb looked at the data and found that air quality was, in fact, worse in southeast Cleveland. Not only that, communities of color across the city also had fewer trees, which help to improve air quality, and sit closer to factories, highways and other sources of pollution.
“That’s when the dots got connected,” Bibb told the Data-Smart City Pod. He began looking into how environmental conditions were shaping Cleveland and its residents and realized that pollution impacted everything from educational outcomes to the city’s economy.
Now in his second term as mayor, Bibb’s administration is striving to update Cleveland’s Clean Air Ordinance for the first time since 1977.
As Washington retreats, local leaders fill the gap
Air pollution is a silent killer. Exposure is linked to everything from heart attacks and strokes to asthma, dementia and other serious health problems. Plus, many sources of air pollution also drive climate change, both contaminating the air and worsening extreme weather.
Since it was established in 1970, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has traditionally led the charge against air pollution, making significant improvements in air quality nationwide. Yet, in an unprecedented reversal, the Trump administration has rolled back important protections against air pollution. In January, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin even directed his staff to stop placing any value on the health benefits of pollution rules when determining air pollution standards, despite the fact that pollution’s costs are well documented — one study finds that Americans face more than $820 billion in health damages annually from fossil fuel pollution. Instead, Zeldin instructed his staff to consider only the cost of implementing protections.
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In the absence of federal leadership, local leaders like mayors are doubling down on reducing air pollution. For example, Bibb’s administration has been working with the Community Data Health Initiative. The initiative, which helps city leaders take on environmental challenges that directly harm people’s health, is a collaboration between the Data-Smart City Solutions program at Harvard University’s Bloomberg Center for Cities, the African American Mayors Association, Meharry Medical College and the global nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.
To better regulate polluters, Cleveland officials are now working with partners and businesses across the city to consider the cumulative impact of air pollution on the neighborhoods closest to factories, highways and other environmental hazards.
In high-risk neighborhoods, a proposed Clean Air Ordinance would require companies to conduct detailed health impact assessments, including air quality modeling and epidemiological risk analyses, before city permits could be approved. The mayor and local groups focused on housing, workers’ rights and health are advancing the measure. But it’s facing pushback from polluting industries and is currently stalled in the City Council.
“Cleveland’s proposed ordinance is a shining example of innovation,” says EDF air quality scientist Maria Harris, who advises the Community Data Health Initiative. “It’s the kind of policy that can actually protect people from air pollution.”
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Other cities stepping up
As the federal government does less to curb pollution, city leaders across the country are trying to protect residents by revising local ordinances, updating permitting systems, and taking advantage of enforcement options already within their authority. Local air quality monitoring on a granular level — a practice that has grown dramatically over the last decade, Harris says — is playing an important role in that process.
In Detroit, for example, city leaders are using hyper-local air quality data combined with EDF's U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index to create a customized tool that tracks local sources of pollution in high-risk neighborhoods. City officials are already using this data to inform truck route enforcement to reduce diesel pollution on the city’s southwest side.
In Denver, adding 0.25% to the sales tax has proven to be a successful model to sustainably fund climate and clean air efforts, even as federal priorities change. The small tax, which voters approved in 2020, now generates roughly $40 million per year to reduce local sources of climate pollution, including by making local clean air investments, including energy efficiency upgrades to homes and offices and investments in solar power, battery storage and other renewable energy technologies, all of which prevent the burning of dirty fossil fuels.
And in Houston, a city with hundreds of polluting petrochemical facilities, local leaders built an “Asthma Air Aware Alert System,” which sends an alert via email, text or phone call to school nurses and parents when ozone, nitrogen dioxide levels, and wind forecasts create asthma-triggering conditions for children.
To expand efforts like these, EDF and partners in the Community Data Health Initiative are building data-to-action tools like the newly launched City Clean Air Hub. It will help cities improve air quality by offering a variety of pollution, public health, communications and funding tools to support cities’ efforts.
As the Trump administration continues to weaken federal rules designed to protect people from air pollution, local efforts like those in Cleveland, Denver, Detroit and Houston are becoming increasingly important.
“Data is power,” says Harris. “No matter what happens at the federal level, with good data and good policy, local leaders still have incredible power to reduce pollution and protect people’s health.”
