2 hours ago
1
Every Sunday in Bogotá, streets across the city are closed to cars and transformed into urban parks. Shirtless rollerbladers with boomboxes drift leisurely in figures of eight, Lycra-clad cyclists zoom downhill and young children wobble nervously as they pedal on bikes for the first time.
This is perhaps the most visible component of a multipronged plan to clean up the Colombian capital’s air. At the turn of the century, Bogotá was one of Latin America’s most polluted cities, with concentrations of harmful particulates at seven times the World Health Organization’s limits. In the last decade the city of 8 million has started to turn that around, cutting air pollution by 24% between 2018 and 2024.
Part of the shift has been the city’s embrace of the bicycle and other forms of clean transport. There are now 350 miles of cycle lanes snaking across the city, the largest cycle lane network in Latin America. Bogotá has also quietly rolled out 1,400 electric buses, one of the world’s largest sustainable bus fleets, and there are three new cable car lines (two under construction) to take people to and from the mountains.
Organisations working with the administration say Bogotá is a model for developing economies to follow not just in cleaning up the air and fighting climate change but in rethinking their cities. “Bogotá is living proof of how cities can cut air pollution, fight climate change and give their residents healthier futures,” says Jaime Rueda, the Bogotá lead at Breathe Cities, a global initiative helping cities tackle air pollution.
Rueda says that while cities usually start by tackling air pollution in the most affluent areas, Bogotá started rolling out clean air zones – zonas urbanas por un mejor aire (Zumas), or urban zones for better air – in the most polluted, such as Bosa in the south of the city, one of Bogotá’s poorest neighbourhoods and home to more than 700,000 socially vulnerable residents and, critically, one of the main routes into the centre.
At one junction, a man dressed as Father Christmas asks drivers for change but there is no one at eye level. Drivers in all three lanes sit high up in lorries that pump out dense trails of black smoke from their shiny, curved exhausts. PM 2.5 particulates cause about 1,500 deaths a year in Bogotá and here in the south the levels are more than three times the WHO’s limit. Here, 8.7 to 17.3 out of every 100,000 people die from respiratory illnesses, compared with 7.47 per 100,000 citywide.
“This is where air pollution has the most serious impacts on people’s health, largely due to unpaved roads, a lack of green space and highly polluting freight transport,” says Adriana Soto, Bogotá’s secretary for the environment. “This is where it is really killing people.”
This is where the first Zuma was rolled out, in the parts of Bosa with the deadliest air. Houses line potholed or unpaved roads that funnel streams of heavy freight into the city and residents say they keep their windows closed to keep out the dust.
Carolina Roches Díaz, 28, says they long for rain to wash away the red-greyish soot that blankets everything from houses and shops to the school and the playground. Children at the local childcare centre are constantly coughing and sneezing and she worries for the long-term health of her three-year-old son who was hospitalised at birth and needed oxygen. “I constantly tell him to cover up his little eyes,” she says, clutching his hand.
Transport accounts for 17% of PM2.5 in Bogotá and trucks generate nearly half of that. The city has started a pilot scheme to subsidise new trucks, to phase out the most polluting vehicles, but the engines themselves are not the main cause. A lack of urban planning means residents have made their own makeshift roads. “About 40% of PM2.5 emissions come from dust churned up by traffic on these unpaved roads,” Soto explains.
As in London’s low-emission zones, the local administration will limit which vehicles can come into the area to cut toxic emissions. And the Zuma is part of a wider urban planning project centred on the local schools. Among the 39 planned changes are repaving roads, rerouting lorries and creating parks and urban forests. Trees will be planted to line the adjacent motorway to protect residents from dust and fumes.
With just 5 square metres of green space for each resident, Bosa is one of the least green parts of Bogotá’s concrete jungle, and the plans show how cleaning up the air can kickstart other positive changes, says Jane Burston, the chief executive of the Clean Air Fund. “Improving the green spaces and public transport as well means there is a lot of excitement about the clean air zone, and other neighbourhoods are already asking for one,” she says.
The mayor’s office says it now wants to turn its bridges and the metro currently under construction into walled gardens— part of more ambitious plans to plant 1,500 trees, more than 2,700 gardens, 362 urban gardens and three urban forests by 2027.
“Clean air should not be a privilege,” says the mayor, Carlos Fernando Galán. “With the Zumas we are bringing environmental action to neighbourhoods that have carried the heaviest burden for too long, showing that cities can protect public health by bringing greener, healthier streets to the communities that need them most.”
