[0:05]Roman Lecom is a man on a mission. Air pollution is an environment issue, but most of all it's a health crisis. More than 5 million people die every year from pollution related illnesses. Roman wants to change that. He has designed a system to help humans learn more about the air they breathe. And he did it in the most unconventional way imaginable. Using pigeons. I will never look at ever again like I did before.
[0:44]London like many cities has a problem. Pollution. It's so bad here. It kills nearly 10,000 citizens a year. The problem about the weather and pollution is they interact together and sometimes create episodes of very high pollution. London weather is notoriously fickle and pollution levels change with the weather. Rains wash up pollutants and winds sweep them away. Roman wanted to make the invisible visible. To do that, he found a way for people to know when the air is particularly toxic.
[1:27]The air was this brilliant crazy idea to fly a flock of prisoners over the city of London with tiny little backpacks to measure air pollution. Roman outfitted a flock of 10 birds to fly around London to monitor air quality in real time.
[1:49]They wore special backpacks equipped with sensors to measure pollutants like ozone and nitrogen dioxide. And they weren't just ordinary birds. They were highly trained. We worked with Brian, expert pigeon fans here who's been very widely recognized in that field. These are professional pigeons. They race, they know how to always home back to their home base. We had an entire patrol of pigeons, Coco, Norbert, Julius.
[2:28]When the pigeons took to the sky, the data they collected was instantly accessible to anyone on the ground. Citizens could tweet the pigeon air patrol and the nearest backpack sensor would respond with readings from low to extreme. Thanks to this people tuned in to know when's a good time to go running and when you can buy without worrying about pollution or when you should really take extra care about the air you breathe. The pigeon air patrol was just a starting point. So of course the pigeon air patrol was not fixing pollution in London but by bringing attention from everyone about this topic, we make it easier for citizens to demand change and so we make it easier for everyone involved to say there's an issue there we should recognize it should address it and then we can fix it.
