A small group of volunteers is challenging Thailand’s powerful industries with the country’s first citizen-drafted Clean Air Bill. Their seven-year battle against toxic air is now reaching a critical point in parliament.

At an International Women’s Day gathering on an unusually windy Saturday in March, protesters wear home-made paper lungs around their necks, delivering an unmistakable message to Thailand’s lawmakers: women, alongside others, are dying from the toxic air they breathe daily. It’s not fair and it certainly doesn’t have to be this way, says Weenarin Lulitanonda, a senior consultant at the World Bank, who calls Bangkok home. But getting that message to resonate with those in power and polluting industries themselves is an uphill battle.

It’s one Weenarin began fighting in 2018 when pollution was only a fringe conversation. The dozens of studies that have since been produced showing the state of Thailand’s poor air quality and the detrimental impacts on people’s health as well as the environment, were only murmurs. The issue was not yet a top priority for the government; clinics treating people for illnesses related to toxic fumes were yet to be established; and the public had not yet taken their widespread outrage online.

Weenarin was confused by the inaction on what she saw as a glaringly obvious health issue. She began to read all literature on the issue, learning that the country’s pollution levels, which today are known to regularly be double levels dubbed safe by the World Health Organization, peak between January and May as agricultural burning layers on top of industrial and traffic emissions. 

During this same period, Weenarin started suffering from persistent headaches; something she attributed to running outside. A dream to participate in the 2018 Paris marathon was quickly dashed in favour of prioritising her health. “I don’t want to die because of this,” she told HaRDstories, explaining that she now no longer runs.

Instead, all her spare time is dedicated to what she calls “the war for clean air”. This is why she stands outside the United Nations headquarters in Bangkok on a Saturday, brandishing a placard that calls out big polluters and politicians while rallying her fellow clean air warriors.

What began as one woman’s health concern has evolved into Thailand’s first coordinated challenge to air pollution – and to powerful industrial interests in a country where economic priorities often overshadow public health. Now, after years of grassroots organising, the group’s citizen-drafted legislation is closer than ever to a breakthrough that could save thousands of lives annually.

“Do you know how hard this is going to be?”

Assembling allies proved Weenarin’s first challenge. In 2018, she began turning her complaints into coalescing, reaching out to experts who could help her push the government into making the right to clean air a reality.

One of her first calls was to Dr. Kanongnij Sribuaiam, an associate professor of law at Chulalongkorn University, known for championing environmental issues with a no-nonsense approach. Kanongnij, however, was not interested. “Do you know how hard this is going to be? Do you know how many people are going to be there to try to undermine everything that you do?” she asked Weenarin at the time.

Kanongnij foresaw the pushback from politicians and big industry unwilling to change their operations and reduce their emissions. According to the Stockholm Environment Institute, industrial emissions are among the top pollutants in Thailand alongside vehicle emissions and agricultural burning.

Weenarin, however, wouldn’t take no for an answer and Kanongnij eventually gave in when she saw the value this work could advance her own research on integrating environmental human rights into Thai legal frameworks and the constitution.

Fast forward seven years and the pair are gripped in a fierce working relationship, united in a mission to see Thailand pass a Clean Air Bill, mandating a cleaner environment in Thailand. Their partnership, along with that of an additional six people, form today what’s known as Thailand Clean Air Network, or Thai CAN.

“We’re probably best described as an organic group of active citizens that were just crazy enough to believe that we should have the right to breathe clean air,” Weenarin explained. “It’s a right to life itself, and we wanted to make sure that’s a right that’s protected not just for ourselves, but for many generations to come.”

Thai CAN does this through advocacy – webinars and social media campaigns, events and exhibitions – and a mining of legal and political battlefields to push through the country’s only citizen-led legislation on the topic and tackle all sources of air pollution: vehicle and industrial emissions, agricultural burning, forest fires, transboundary and urbanisation. Each of the groups’ eight members bring different expertise to the fight, be it law, environmental economics or communications, – and work for free, dedicating their evenings and weekends to the cause.

“Like a lot of air quality organisations, [Thai CAN] operates with a lot of unpaid hours, fueled by its volunteers. They have been quite strategic in how they use their time, by focusing tightly on policy outcomes and driving those,” said Christa Hasenkopf, director of the Clean Air Program at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “From what I’ve observed, they’ve also been relentless and creative, finding ways to get the message out in as many ways as possible.”

The question, however, is why it should ever have been up to them?

How Thai CAN built the case for clean air

The problem, initially, was a lack of public data on the country’s air pollutants, especially PM2.5 – fine particulate matter that is so small it can penetrate deep into the lungs, said Weenarin. “We initially took the angle of bringing in more low cost sensors to have enough data points because you can’t manage what you don’t know,” she explained. “PM2.5 is only in the vocabulary of most people over the last six years,” she said. The government did not include its PM2.5 data in the World Air Quality Index or form a national action plan until October, 2018.

Today, data still shows that Thailand’s PM2.5 levels pose a moderate risk to people’s health, shaving around two years off life expectancy; pollution can be linked to heart and lung disease, cancers and strokes. It also contributes to global warming, further straining an environment the world is trying to keep from warming above 1.5°C. Yet less than three percent of climate change resources go toward maintaining clean air.

For change to happen, polluters need economic incentives to reduce emissions and switch to greener energy. Legislation could drive such action, which is why alongside the push for more localised data, Kanongnij suggested Thai CAN draft a Clean Air Act. “This is an absolutely necessary condition to get policy and action on air pollution,” said Hasenkopf from the Energy Policy Institute in Chicago.

To table legislation though, Thai CAN needed over 10,000 signatures of support – a process that took two years since signatures had to be collected on paper rather than online during the COVID-19 pandemic when people mostly stayed home.

In 2021, after Kanongnij had spent hours drafting the bill from scratch and consulting with local groups – including farmers who are often accused of contributing the most to poor air quality – Thai CAN submitted it to parliament. Six other drafts were submitted from stakeholders such as the Chamber of Commerce and the cabinet.

After two years of little movement, a committee of 39 people was eventually formed – 13 representing Thai CAN – tasked with merging the seven drafts into one. All aim to lower emissions and improve air quality, but Thai CAN wants a bill that prioritises civil society voices, creates a government body with funding from a “polluters pay principle,” offers economic incentives for companies transitioning to greener operations, addresses transboundary haze from neighbouring countries, and educates the public to drive local action. It’s an ambitious blueprint for transforming how Thailand addresses its air pollution crisis.

The current Pollution Control Department serves mainly in a monitoring capacity and lacks enforcement power, said Diane Archer, senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, a non-profit research institute. “Having a single law that brings together all the aspects of regulations around air pollution and that creates a single entity that will have enforcement power is something really important to be able to take concrete and effective action across the board on air pollution,” she said.

The committee, now a year into deliberations, is on track to produce a consolidated bill in 2025. It will then face review by MPs, potentially move to the senate and public consultation, before finally – and hopefully – receiving royal approval.

The pushback to the bill

The opposition in the committee comes from an underlying fear that any mandated changes to industry operations would harm the economy, said Weenarin. Thailand has worked its way up to upper-middle income status through investments in infrastructure, manufacturing and poverty reduction. Anything that might jeopardise the country’s productive capacity or private companies’ income generation is viewed as dangerous, Weenarin explained; a threat worth the health of its citizens?

Kanongnij, who at the march in Bangkok was wearing hot pink trainers that contrasted with the skull mounted on a spear she carried, saw first-hand the damage toxic air can do. Her mother died in 2020 after two years in a hospice, suffering from a lung tumour. For Kanongnij, pollution was to blame and the passing of her mother remains a driving force in her voluntary work with Thai CAN.

Determined to see the bill come to fruition, she juggles her teaching position with four days a week in parliament where a riverside room with formal tables and microphones hosts two committee and two subcommittee meetings each week. She’s often accompanied by a group of her students – her “small legal mafia” – who help as she navigates the complex legislative process. The environmental lawyer’s days run long, with nights devoted to Thai CAN meetings or preparing protest materials like the marches’ placards and paper lungs. This grueling schedule explains why she admits to taking a daily nap in the car as her husband drives her the 40 minutes home each day.

The medical perspective

For Dr. Wirun Limsawart, a physician and anthropologist with the Ministry of Public Health and a Thai CAN co-founder, the weekly schedule is equally demanding. But he remains steadfast in the fight for clean air because of his three children, aged between 17 and nine. When approached to join the team in 2019, he was already working in his spare time on air quality issues, though on a smaller scale. Wirun was part of a network of nine parents coalescing around how to improve air quality at their children’s city centre school.

Taking this concern from local to national, Wirun’s first task with Thai CAN was helping create a 2019 white paper that explained air pollution issues and potential solutions to the public. This work involved in-person consultations in northern and northeastern Thailand, where pollution levels are typically highest, meeting with affected stakeholders including farmers and ethnic communities. Since then, the doctor – a former director of a local hospital in Nakhon Si Thammarat and active member of the rural doctor’s movement – has served on the legislation committee, explaining to the opponents of the bill the consequences of ignoring people’s right to clean air.