Clean Air Student
Council

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The Clean Air Student Council (CASC) is the youth branch of Clean Air Network (CAN).

The idea was initiated in 2019 when a group of passionate students built their own air sensors and took the step to monitor the air quality in different schools through coordination with students . The council was given a name and was formally launched in 2020, in order to serve the purpose of educating students about air pollution, empowering communities, and engaging in various forms of clean air action.

The CASC currently consists of more than 20 students ages 14 to 18 from six schools The council is constantly looking for opportunities to expand in order to enlist more students from local and international schools into joining the clean air education movement.

Hong Kong Clean Air Conference

The Clean Air Student Council has consecutively hosted the Hong Kong Clean Air Conference for 3 years. The Clean Air Conference is an annual event through which students from secondary schools can participate to share the knowledge on air pollution. Every year there is different theme of the conference and students from local and international school attend to learn, listen to a variety of speakers and participate in different activities.

Hong Kong Clean Air Conference 2022
Hong Kong Clean Air Conference 2021
Hong Kong Clean Air Conference 2019

Hong Kong Clean Air Conference 2022

In February, 2022, the Clean Air Student Council successfully continued the annual Hong Kong Clean Air Conference under the theme of “Tackling Air Pollution and its Effects in Urban Communities”. Icebreakers, educational games, and talks from contemporary figures in the fight against air pollution were all key highlights from the conference. A total of 50 people from both international and local schools participated in this conference, fully engaging with the activities set up by the newly established Education team and Events team.

The speakers invited were, Natalie Chung, a climate advocate and social entrepreneur born and raised in Hong Kong and Hermion Au, co-founder of a participatory design studio Baak6Zou6 and a founding member of Street Reset, a citizen-driven advocacy group on human-centric street design.

Many participants of the conference also took part in the Hong Kong Environmental Writer’s Competition by writing essays under the same theme of “Tackling Air Pollution and its Effects in Urban Communities”. The winners, who were adjudicated by professional environmentalists and announced at the end of the conference, shared their insights and ideas with all participants.

Speakers

Hermione Au

Graduate from MSc Urban Design and City Planning of UCL, Hermion devotes herself to human-centered urban and community design. She is now the Lab Manager of JC MaD Social Lab and experienced in collaborative design with different stakeholders including government, citizens and community organisations. She is also a co-founder of participatory design studio Baak6Zou6 and a founding member of Street Reset, a citizen-driven advocacy group on human-centric street design.

Natalie Chung

Natalie Chung Sum Yue is a climate advocate and social entrepreneur born and raised in Hong Kong. Inspired by a polar explorer since young, Natalie devotes her life to climate action and environmental education. At the age of 18, she co-founded V’air Hong Kong, a social enterprise which promotes low-carbon local tourism as means to mitigate climate change. V'air has held over 100 tours and educational programmes for schools and corporate to inculcate values of ecocentrism and nature appreciation among the public. As an impactful sustainability leader in Asia Pacific, she has been awarded the Tatler Gen.T List, Eco-Business Youth A-List. Natalie holds an MPhil in Environmental Change and Management (Distinction) at University of Oxford and a BSSc in Geography and Resource Management (First Class Honours) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She was awarded a full scholarship for her postgraduate studies at Oxford as the 2019 Esther Yewpick Lee Millennium Scholar.

Hong Kong Clean Air Conference 2021

On January 2021, the Clean Air Student Council hosted the Hong Kong Clean Air Conference under the theme Pollution and Policies. The conference featured icebreakers, talks from experts and critical thinking exercises. The Clean Air Student Council also had the opportunity to share some work done with its Marine Emissions Campaign through a video made which included a series of interviews conducted at the Central Pier.

The speakers invited were London-based environmental journalist, TEDx speaker, and author of Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution, Mrs. Beth Gardiner, and Hong Kong-based Environmentalist and Lead Strategist at Personalised Real-Time Air Quality Informatics System for Exposure – Hong Kong, Dr. Michelle Wong, to share their expertise and experience around tackling air pollution and opinions on related policies.

Students who participated in a writing competition launched earlier under the prompt of “Air Pollution Progress and Policies” were also invited as winners were presented at the end of the conference.

Speakers

Michelle Wong

Lead strategist on branding, marketing, and stakeholder engagement of PRAISE-HK -- world-leading air quality, and health mobile app system. With over 10-year long tenure working in a leading policy think-tank in Hong Kong and HKUST. A passionate storyteller with proven success in packaging scientific information into comprehensible messages and making impacts in evidence-based policy-making processes.

Beth Gardiner

Beth Gardiner is an American journalist based in London. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Time, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Yale Environment 360. These days, she focuses mainly on stories about environment, health and sustainability, but she’s written about everything from politics, education and feminism to food and the arts. ​ Beth spent 10 years as a reporter for the Associated Press, based first in New York and then in London. Her AP assignments included traveling to Aceh, Indonesia, days after the tsunami there to cover its aftermath, flying on Tony Blair’s plane to write about prime ministerial trips to China, India and Washington, and reporting from the Middle East during a flare-up of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Beth has discussed her work on NPR's All Things Considered, WNYC's Brian Lehrer show, and the BBC's World at One, as well as on MSNBC, CBC in Canada, Sky News, ITN, LBC radio, and Al Jazeera English. She was a speaker at TEDx London at the Royal Festival Hall. ​ The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the Society of Environmental Journalists both awarded grants to support Beth’s work on Choked, which is her first book.

Hong Kong Clean Air Conference 2019

The first Hong Kong Clean Air Conference 2019 was organized in October 2019 with participation from students from many schools. The theme of the conference was air pollution and health where speakers like Professor Amos Tai, and James Ockenden spoke on their experience and research related to air pollution and health.

Speakers

James Ockenden

Writer, journalist and sustainability consultant with a passion for clean technology and public health. 25 years covering power and energy markets: former editor of Power Plant Technology, International Power Generation, Asian Electricity, Aircraft Economics, Energy Risk, Asia Risk, Benchmark; writer for South China Morning Post, Cathay Dragon's Silkroad, APlus, Veolia's "Planet", Hong Kong Tatler; founder of Blue Skies China. MSocSc in Corporate Environmental Governance, University of Hong Kong; BA & MA degree in Natural Sciences (major in Materials Science & Metallurgy), Cambridge University.

Dr Amos P.K.Tai

Dr. Amos P. K. Tai is an Assistant Professor in the Earth System Science Programme at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.Specializing in the atmospheric and climate sciences, his research combines high-performance computer models with statistical analysis of global observations to examine the interactions between ecosystems and the atmosphere, addressing societally relevant issues such as how air pollution and climatic hazards impact ecosystem services and food security, and how better land-use, forest and agricultural management may help improve air quality and mitigate climate change.

Hong Kong Clean Air Campaigns

Air-monitoring Campaign (AMC)
Earth Day 2021 Air-monitoring Campaign

The purpose of this initiative was to allow students to engage in a hands-on activity to actively get to know the quality of the air they breathe on a daily basis. For Earth Day 2021, students from Island School, Discovery College and St. Paul’s Co-educational College all distributed diffusion tubes to younger students from their respective schools in order to collect data in various areas around Hong Kong. These diffusion tubes reacted with nitrogen oxide, a common pollutant found at local street-level pollution, for approximately two weeks before being taken down and sent to a lab in the United Kingdom to generate results. Some students then produced a report in which they analyzed the data, mapped out geographical trends of air quality across Hong Kong, and discussed possible solutions to alleviate air pollution.

Check out this report the students came up with over the summer of 2021.

Read report

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