Air pollution affects health, livelihoods and productivity, while transport shapes how people move through and experience their cities. The evidence and data exist, and increasingly so do the solutions; the missing link is making that knowledge matter to the people who need to understand it and act on it.
That was the central point of discussion at ‘The Missing Link: Why Communications Is Policy Work’, a communications roundtable hosted by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago – India (EPIC India) and the International Council on Clean Transportation – India (ICCT India) on the sidelines of the India Clean Transportation Summit 2026, ICCT India’s flagship annual event in New Delhi. The conversation brought together journalists, researchers, communicators, creators and storytellers, and was moderated by Almas Naseem, Senior Communications Specialist at ICCT, and Ashirbad S. Raha, Regional Director – Communications at EPIC India.
The discussion was opened by Almas Naseem, who set the context for why effective communication needs to be central to conversations on clean air and transportation. She highlighted the need to move beyond policy briefs and make evidence relevant to everyday conversations, using ICCT and UChicago’s Air Quality Life Index findings to illustrate the scale and personal impact of vehicular pollution.
One of the clearest takeaways was that just dissemination is not communication. Putting a report online is only the beginning. Communication has to start much earlier, with a basic question: who needs to care about this, what do they already care about, and how does the evidence connect to that? As Aakriti Tyagi, Director – Strategic Communications at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), put it, communications needs to be treated as the ‘first mile’ of policy work, rather than the last.
Michael Doerrer, Communications Director at ICCT, made a similar point from his work in the US. Strong technical findings may not necessarily translate into policy change or public attention. What can help is making findings simple, local and repeatable, and connecting them to lived experiences so that evidence has a clear entry point into people’s everyday lives. EPIC India’s Ashirbad Raha, aligning with the insight, shared about the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) tool, which translates changes in particulate pollution into life-expectancy impacts, offering one way to connect a technical finding to something people can immediately understand.
That raised the next question: what does ‘local’ actually look like? It starts with changing the way we frame air pollution and transport. For air pollution, that could mean moving beyond a conversation about PM2.5 averages to asking what dirty air means in the rhythm of everyday life. How many school days might a child miss? How many sick days does it mean for a family? How many trips to the doctor? As Soumya Chatterjee of Hindustan Times suggested, the challenge is to turn a number on a page into something people can recognise in their own lives.
The same shift becomes even more important when talking about transport. Unlike air pollution, whose effects can feel immediate and physical, transport policy can be harder to see. Ankita Rajeshwari, Communications Lead, Transport, at WRI India, pointed to the need to frame transport around mobility and quality of life rather than just vehicles. Can a child safely walk or cycle to school? Can an elderly parent run everyday errands using public transport? Can someone get home on time? Does the city actually make it easier to live the life people want?
This reframing also reveals something important about audiences. They are not necessarily uninterested in policy. Sumantra Bibhuti Barooah, Editor, Technical, ET Auto, noted that policy-related stories can see greater traction than stories focused on an OEM, product or collaboration. The challenge is finding the questions and framing that allow people to enter the conversation and help policymakers develop clearer, more sustainable solutions.
And once people enter it, the story has to give them something to hold on to. Risha Chitlangia, an independent journalist, spoke about the importance of humanising evidence by putting a face to the story and showing how research translates into impacts on people’s health, lives, productivity and finances. Numbers can establish the scale of a problem, but a case study or lived experience can make that scale meaningful. She also stressed the need to move beyond communicating the problem to communicating solutions: research can help build the case for why a policy intervention matters, but people also need to see what a better future could look like and why they should support it.
However, demystifying data and evidence does not mean stripping research of its complexity. Priyanshi Sharma of Peek TV spoke about the power of photographs and visualising case studies to make stories more impactful, while stressing that making research accessible does not mean making it simplistic. The task is to granularise the story, use numbers alongside visuals, and explain the evidence without assuming audiences need less of it.
The conversation also recognised that audiences have already heard many versions of the warning. Srishti Choudhary, Senior Correspondent of Network 18, pointed to the need to move beyond repeatedly telling people that air pollution will harm them. If PM2.5 levels are high, people also want to know what that means and what they can do. She also highlighted that the same research cannot be communicated in the same way across print, digital and electronic media. Each format calls for a different way of thinking about the story, from its tone and framing to the headline, and researchers and communicators need to explore how the same evidence can be shaped differently for each platform and audience. Air quality is no longer only a climate story; research needs to be communicated simply enough for any beat reporter to understand and use.
Going by today’s trends for younger audiences, the format matters too. Prince Kushwah from Street Logic spoke about the potential of Instagram to connect these issues to everyday experiences and lifestyles. A collaboration between researchers and creators, perhaps through a ‘research versus reality’ format, could make technical evidence feel more familiar to Gen Z audiences.
One of the challenges discussed was that even a compelling story can struggle if it has nowhere to travel. Tamseel Hussain, founder of Pluc TV, described this as building a ‘narrative infrastructure’, an ecosystem connecting communities, creators and online platforms, and eventually larger cultural spaces such as cinema and studios. If the same stories about air pollution keep appearing in the same places, they will continue to reach the same audiences. Rohit Upadhyay, an independent journalist, documentarian and YouTuber, emphasised that every platform has its limitations and that the narrative itself needs to shift. Rather than presenting air pollution only as an environmental issue, communicators can connect it to quality of life and local experiences, while looking beyond Delhi and other urban centres to rural communities and to people who contribute least to the problem but may be affected more.
This also meant that communications cannot always come at the end of the policy process. Sherebanu Frosh of Raahgiri Foundation spoke about the value of coordinating with government early, when good policies are being developed, so that the visuals, messages and narratives are ready to travel alongside them. Tanushree Ganguly, Program Advisor at Coefficient Giving, pointed to airsheds as an example of how a narrative can gain traction when it is consistently communicated through trusted voices.
Ultimately, the conversation steered not to whether we are producing enough content, but to whether that content is actually working. Chetan Bhattacharji, a climate communication consultant, journalist and Founder of Earth Chakra, noted that making media has become easier, but making something people will actually watch is much harder. For organisations investing in communications, success therefore cannot end with publication. Are the intended audiences seeing it? Are policymakers responding? Is the idea entering everyday conversation? And if it is not, what needs to change?
The roundtable brought the discussion back to a simple challenge: how do we make evidence travel? The insights pointed to a clear answer: it is not about communicating more, but communicating differently for every audience. That means simplifying without hollowing out the findings, using visuals to make the evidence more immediate, telling the story through a person rather than a percentage, and connecting the findings to things people feel directly – their health, their livelihoods and their pockets. It means adapting the tone, framing and message for different platforms, and repeating the story across enough places and trusted voices for it to stay with people. The goal is to make evidence feel less like a policy brief and more like something that is happening to someone people know, and to make air pollution and transport research part of the everyday conversation, rather than something that surfaces only in a particular season, crisis or region.