Ricardo at Better Air Quality 2026

Ricardo, member of WSP, sent a dedicated team to the Better Air Quality 2026 conference in Bangkok – Dr Mark Broomfield, Honor Puciato, Eleri Paterson Hughes and JM Reyes.

This is the third BAQ conference that Ricardo has contributed to, following Kuching in 2018 and Manila in 2023. What has changed over that time? Firstly, there was a much higher priority and focus on financing at BAQ 2026. There is a feeling that the time has come to commit serious money to air quality improvements. So a lot of the discussion was about financial mechanisms – focused on how we can make a difference, rather than what measures to implement.

Secondly, there was real anger bubbling up that we are still at a conference talking about the burden of air pollution, when we should be sharing evidence of action and success. Activist Saad Amer got us chanting that “we can make a difference,” and the lack of finance available to deal with air pollution compared to investment in climate mitigation was described as shocking and even “sinful”. We know the statistics about the global burden of air pollution in terms of early deaths, illness, poor quality of life, and economic burden. We can design measures to make things better. There’s nothing preventing the air quality and financing community from delivering substantive progress.

At Ricardo, we will be part of this solution. We are working closely with partners at the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, who are putting serious investment into air quality measures. We are supporting planned investments in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, and identified further opportunities to make a real difference in Pakistan, Brazil, Laos and other geographies. I personally had over 40 valuable conversations with potential partners and funders.

It was great to hear very positive support for the Air Quality Toolkit, which we developed for Clean Air Fund in collaboration with Clean Air Asia. We were able to talk about our plans for an innovative Clean Air Finance Accelerator. This will build on the successful UK Government backed Climate Finance Accelerator to provide access for investors to investment-ready clean air projects – and vice versa.

When the next Better Air Quality conference comes around in 2028, our team will be fully rebranded as WSP but we hope it's not the only thing that has changed. At BAQ 2028 we hope we will be saying “this is what we’re doing”. And at the one after that – “this is what we did!”