A new cohort of cities is set to benefit from additional funding and technical support to fight pollution, as the $30 million Breathe Cities clean air initiative expands.

The Breathe Cities initiative is a partnership between Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Clean Air Fund, and C40 Cities to save lives, improve health, and reduce air pollution in cities around the world.

It was launched earlier this year, with London and Warsaw benefiting from enhanced air quality data, community engagement, capacity building, as part of the program. The new cohort of Breathe Cities was announced at the COP28 conference in Dubai and includes Brussels, Johannesburg and Paris.

The cities will also join together in a first-of-its-kind partnership to exchange knowledge and scale local impact. According to the Breathe Cities initiative, the participating local governments were chosen based on criteria such as geographic diversity, air pollution and emissions intensity, and capacity to implement action plans, among other metrics.

Breathe Cities has set the ambitious goal of contributing to reducing air pollution by 30 percent on average across participating cities by 2030 compared to 2019 levels.

It estimates would prevent an estimated 39,000 premature deaths and around 79,000 new cases of asthma in children each decade, saving $107 billion in avoided hospitalizations and deaths.

Read the full article about cities tackling air pollution by Jamie Hailstone at Forbes.