1. Early career

2. Advocacy: Children and the Poisoned Poor

3. Building A Model For Global Pollution Cleanup

4. Calling Attention to the Global Pollution Crisis

5. References

6. External links

Fuller has focused on the problem of global pollution and its impact on health for nearly 20 years, having been driven by its neglect in the global agenda. In a 2010 profile, Time magazine's Power of One column described his motivation: “The low priority that the world—including the media—tends to place on toxic pollution in developing countries is one of the reasons Fuller founded the nonprofit Blacksmith Institute”^[2]

Fuller established the international nonprofit Blacksmith Institute in 1999 (renamed Pure Earth in 2015^[3]) using profits from Great Forest, a pioneering corporate sustainability consultancy he started in 1989.^[4] Pure Earth is dedicated to solving pollution problems in low and middle-income countries, where human health is at risk. It is the only significant nonprofit organization working in global pollution cleanup. Fuller serves as president of both Pure Earth and Great Forest.

In 2011, Fuller received the UN-backed Green Star Award on behalf of Blacksmith Institute/Pure Earth.^[5] The award recognized Blacksmith's work in environmental emergencies, particularly for its response efforts during the 2010 Nigeria lead poisoning crisis, which killed hundreds of children.^[6]

In 2014, Bloomberg Businessweek chronicled the growth of Pure Earth and Fuller's work on toxic pollution problems around the world, including a dangerous cleanup of a secret former Soviet arms site in the Ukraine.^[7]

While Pure Earth continued to clean up polluted communities, in 2012 Fuller founded the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution to bring countries together to build public, political, technical and financial support to address pollution globally, and assist low- and middle-income countries to fight pollution.

Working with Pure Earth and the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, Fuller was part of a global team that successfully worked to broaden the scope of toxic pollution addressed in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),^[8] as described in a profile in the UN Dispatch.

These efforts led Fuller to help convene and co-chair the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, an initiative of The Lancet, the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, with additional coordination and input from United Nations Environment, United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and the World Bank.

The Commission released its landmark report in Oct 2017 confirming Fuller's long-held view, finding that pollution is the largest environmental cause of death in the world, killing over 9 million people worldwide, threatening the "continuing survival of human societies."^[9]

In an open letter to mark the release of the report from The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health,^[10][11] Fuller writes: “For too long, pollution has been sidelined, overshadowed, ignored by the world, in part because it is a complicated topic with many causes, and as many outcomes. Often it kills slowly, and indirectly, hiding its tracks. With this report, we bring pollution out of the shadows.”

The report generated immense global interest, with news coverage worldwide including the Guardian,^[12] PBS NewsHour^[13] and Fareed Zakaria devoted his "What In The World" segment to the report.^[14]

As a result, Fuller was invited to present ^[15] the report at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in February 2018. He was also invited to provide briefings of the report at the World Bank,^[16] the UN, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine^[17] and other key international development and professional meetings.

In 2015, Santa Monica Press published "The Brown Agenda: My Mission To Clean Up The World's Most Life-Threatening Pollution"^[18], written by Fuller and Damon DiMarco. The book documents his adventures at some of the world's most toxic locations, and introduces readers to the plight of the poisoned poor, suggesting specific ways in which anyone can help combat brown sites all over the world.^[19]

In a 2015 interview on The Takeaway on NPR, Fuller noted the differences in approaches to climate change and pollution: "... over the last couple of decades, climate change has taken over as the key environmental issue. So now we find that the agenda of these countries is biodiversity and climate change, and pollution has simply dropped off the map. This is an extraordinary result and one we really need to turn around."^[20]

Early career

Richard Fuller graduated with a degree in Engineering from Melbourne University and began work for IBM. He left Australia in 1988 to work directly on global environmental issues in the Amazon rainforests of Brazil with the United Nations Environmental Programme. He then brought his experience to New York, establishing Great Forest Inc. to work on greening commercial buildings and corporations in the pioneering days of corporate social responsibility. Realizing that enhancing sustainability practices to corporations alone would not have enough impact on global environmental issues, Fuller started Pure Earth (formerly known as Blacksmith Institute) to tackle the problem on a larger scale.^[21]

Advocacy: Children and the Poisoned Poor

Fuller's focus is not just on pollution in general, but specifically on disease-causing pollution that impacts the health of people, especially those living in low and middle-income countries.

“Toxic chemicals from industry and mining affect the health of hundreds of millions of people in low- and middle-income countries,” he wrote in The Poisoned Poor in 2012.^[22]

"We've already solved most of the pollution problems in the West. There aren't people dying in droves in the U.S. or in England - they're all dying overseas, in low- and middle-income countries," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.^[23][24] on the publication of his 2015 book "The Brown Agenda."

Fuller believes that pollution is one of the most serious problems facing the earth.^[25] "The health of roughly 100 million people is at risk from pollution in developing countries."^[26]

"A particular concern...is the accumulating and long-lasting burden (of pollution) building up in the environment and in the bodies of the people most directly affected."^[27]

In 2014, Bloomberg Businessweek chronicled Blacksmith/Pure Earth's growth. The article offered a behind-the-scenes look at how Fuller came upon a secret abandoned chemical weapons factory site in the Ukraine that was sitting on top of a forgotten "bomb", and worked to make the site safe before the onset of hostilities in the area.^[7] The article also explained: "Fuller’s mission is to help kids play safely on the beach or bathe in a river, not save spotted owls and polar bears. He also knew he wanted to serve the poor, because “the U.S. has the resources to clean up its own Superfund sites.” Mostly, he didn't want to be another nongovernmental organization dedicated merely to raising awareness."^[7]

In 2017 The UNEP acknowledged Fuller’s message publishing “The Impact of Pollution on Planetary Health: Emergence of an Underappreciated Risk Factor.^[28]” 

A paper he co-authored, “Pollution and Children’s Health,^[29]” points out that “Pollution was responsible in 2016 for 940,000 deaths in children, two-thirds under age 5,” and that “92% of pollution-related deaths in children occur in low- and middle-income countries.” His conclusion was that “pollution prevention presents a major, largely unexploited opportunity to improve children’s health especially in low and middle-income countries."

Although toxic pollution is widespread, it is one global problem that can be solved. “There’s a finite number of polluted sites out there, and you can fix them for relatively little.”^[30] "The good news is we have known technologies and proven strategies for eliminating a lot of this pollution."^[31]

Building A Model For Global Pollution Cleanup

In 1999, Fuller established Blacksmith Institute to focus on pollution remediation. Over the years, Blacksmith has completed over 50 pollution cleanup projects around the world.^[32]

In his first decade with Pure Earth, Fuller created a number of initiatives that established a model for global pollution cleanup. Fuller recognized the need to measure and quantify pollution in order to set priorities and push governments for action. The set of tools he developed are still being used today to rapidly identify, assess and rank polluted sites in order to prioritize cleanup. They include:

• The Blacksmith Index, developed with Johns Hopkins University and used around the world to rate levels of health risk from pollution;
• The creation of the Toxic Sites Identification Program (TSIP)^[33] to train local investigators to use these tools to identify and assess hotspots. To date, TSIP has trained over 400 investigators worldwide, who have mapped and documented more than 3,000 toxic sites in over 50 countries ^[34] and screened more than 1,800 sites, representing a potential health risk to more than 80 million poor people.^[32]
• The creation of the TSIP database^[35] of polluted sites, one of the largest of its kind, containing data collected through the TSIP. This database is crucial to countries trying to address pollution. It makes available country-specific pollution data for the purpose of pollution planning, to help officials identify and prioritize the cleanup of sites that pose the most risk to residents in order to save lives.^[36]
• The development of the Health and Pollution Action Plans (HPAP).^[37] The TSIP database now supports the HPAP, launched to help governments of low- and middle-income countries strategize and plan solutions to pollution-related health challenges. Madagascar was the first country to complete the Health and Pollution Action Plan process.

Calling Attention to the Global Pollution Crisis

" … toxic pollution is the largest cause of death in the world. Yet it is one of the most underreported and underfunded global problems," Fuller told the World Bank.^[38]

Fuller's efforts to call attention to the crisis took many forms, including:

• His 2015 book "The Brown Agenda: My Mission To Clean Up The World's Most Life-Threatening Pollution", Fuller recounts his research into global issues, and his first-hand accounts of seeing pollution's impact around the world, from the woman in Senegal who lost five children under two years of age because she was recycling used lead acid batteries in her yard, to the town in the Ukraine, where the life expectancy was under 50. He also recounted one of the most dangerous cleanups he'd ever faced—an abandoned Soviet weapons factory filled with highly toxic chemicals and TNT sat in the middle of the town, turning it into a ticking time bomb. A lightning strike or an accident “would wipe out every living thing in a radius of many miles.”
• Fuller is also responsible for the creation and launch of the annual World's Worst Polluted Places Reports.^[39] He saw the same tale in every community he visited and he decided that he needed to start ringing the alarm bells, most notably with the World's Worst Pollution Problems reports, which he launched in 2006. The popular series of annual reports tracked the world's worst polluted problems and places and resulted in news coverage year after year for over a decade, raising global awareness of the issue.
• In order to encourage more research focused on low and middle-income countries, Fuller launched the Journal of Health and Pollution,^[40] which promotes and brings together academic research on the health effects of life-threatening toxic pollution.
• In 2015, working with Pure Earth and the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, Fuller was part of a global team that successfully worked to broaden the scope of toxic pollution addressed in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).^[13] Including pollution in the SDGs was a major feat that aims to ensure some of the world's resources will be directed to fight pollution and save lives.
• Following his success with the SDGs, Fuller turned to focus on his work as co-chair of the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health. After years of work gathering data and making alliances across disciplines, Fuller was instrumental in bringing together over 50 researchers worldwide in an effort to quantify the health and economic costs of pollution.

References

External links

• Blacksmith Institute
• Great Forest, Inc.
• World's Worst Polluted Places Reports

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