The UK is the second largest emitter of Nitrogen Dioxide in Europe.
The toxic gas is largely caused by diesel engines and is linked to lung and breathing conditions, as well as premature deaths.
Clean air campaigners are urging the British government to do more to clean up the country's air, and have recently won a court case to force the government to bring down its illegal limits of air pollution.
Our UK correspondent Natalie Powell reports…
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This is the homepage for the app, which enables you to see the air you're breathing by connecting to this sensor,…
Lord Drayson, CEO of Drayson technologies is giving us a demonstration of the CleanSpace App.
It measures and maps air pollution .
LORD DRAYSON, CEO, DRAYSON TECHNOLOGIES
It provides you with personal information which is relevant to your life, so you can see when you're travelling to work or when you're at home what the air quality is like. Take action if it's not good. But also it connects you to a community of people that are helping to collect this information such that we can create the most comprehensive, most accurate map of air pollution that changes all the time, and really provide that information that everyone can then share to be motivated to improve air quality.
Using a sensor, call a tag and an app on your phone it allows you to track the air pollution where you are and avoid pollution hot-spots.
Along busy roads, it shows amber or red peaks. But in quieterr areas, like a park, levels are in the green.
Major contributors to air pollution are diesel vehicles.
They emit a toxic gas called nitrogen dioxide, which is linked to lung problems… and even premature deaths.
The UK has the second highest levels of NO2 in Europe - falling behind only to Italy.
Simon Alcock is a campaigner for environmental law organisation Client Earth, they've recently won a court case against the UK government over its pollution levels.
SIMON ALCOCK, CLIENT EARTH
The Government are breaking legal limits of air pollution, in particular this case called nitrogen dioxide, we won a court case last year in 2015 in the Supreme Court in the UK.
Which ordered the government to come back with plans that would meet these limits in shortest time possible, they did that, we though they weren't good enough, we took them back to court and we won our case in November this year so now the government has 8 months to come up with a new plan which we hope will be good enough.
The British capital seems to be listening, London's Mayor Saddiq Khan has recently launched plans to double funding to clean up the cities air.
But London is falling behind capital cities such as Paris, Mexico City, Madrid and Athens, who have recently announced they will ban diesel vehicles by 2025.
And globally, each country faces different types of issues when it comes to clean air, as Simon Alcock from Client Earth explains.
SIMON ALCOCK, CLIENT EARTH
China is probably at where we were in the 1950s when we had the original clean air act which dealt with the smogs of London which was caused by coal and having factories in the City. That's where China is right now and they're going to try to take action to deal with that
The UK is slightly different, it's diesel cars causing this problem, nitrogen dioxide coming from those.so it's a different issue, but equally as bad.
It's estimated that in Europe alone 71 thousand people a year die prematurely because of Nitrogen Dioxide pollution.
And campaigners believe collecting a pollution database will help spur on governments to do more to clean up dirty air.
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