Jaime Pumarejo, a former Colombian mayor, is taking the helm at Breathe Cities as executive director.

The clean air initiative is a partnership between Bloomberg Philanthropies, Clean Air Fund, and C40 Cities, which supports cities around the world to cut their air pollution and climate emissions. 

Pumarejo will lead the programme after serving as mayor of Barranquilla for three years since 2020. 

He steered the city of 1.2 million, known as the ‘golden gate of Colombia’ through the pandemic crisis, which saw 6.5 million Colombians nationwide contract the Covid-19 virus and over 142,000 deaths, according to John Hopkins University.  

The former mayor is also known for building Barranquilla as a sustainable and inclusive urban development, serving as Colombia’s housing and urban development Minister in President Juan Manuel Santos’ government in 2017. 

Barranquilla’s mayor has helped shed the city of its industrial past, choosing green urban development. He filed a lawsuit against Colombia’s federal government in 2022, in a mission to protect its biodiversity. 

As part of an initiative by the World Economic Forum, called BiodiverCities, Barranquilla and more than 120 other cities in Latin America aim to encourage a healthy balance between urban growth and open green spaces that promote nature, sustainability and outside activity.  

Since 2020, Pumarejo remodelled a riverfront known as the Gran Malecón, revitalising the wetlands to the north-west of the city as a consequence, and restored parks through a programme called Todos Al Parque. 

Pumarejo said he is ‘excited’ to take on the challenge of clean air and hopes to ‘expand the initiative even further and help millions more experience the health, environmental, economic and social justice benefits that clean air brings’. 

The most heavily polluted cities in the world are in Central and Latin America, South and South-East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.  

Latin America is also seeing the largest increase in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) exposure, according to The State of Global Air Report. 

Shafi Musaddique is the news editor at Alliance Magazine