Nobody gave us permission to declare a national day

A holiday that existed only because we said so on national TV - until a country agreed.

In 2016 Macedonia had 298 days of extreme pollution, 1,350 pollution-related deaths in Skopje alone, and 35% of all illnesses in direct correlation with the air. Bringing particle pollution down to EU limits would have saved over 800 lives and €151 million in health costs every year. And nobody was talking about it - a handful of individuals had tried to raise the alarm and got nowhere.

So we used our own powerful platform, the One on One talk show (Eden na Eden in Macedonian) which was and still is the highest rated TV talk show in the country, and a product of BDG agency. We published a video proclaiming Monday, February 6 to be Air Day, and asked the country to unite and be vocal - post support, post their fears, their anger, their suggestions for fixing it.

Thousands of people started sharing photos, posts and links under a single hashtag, and by the end of the day #AirDay had been seen over three million times on Instagram and Twitter alone - in a country of below two million citizens. Singers, actors, athletes, politicians, companies, news outlets all joined in. Within days the government imposed emergency measures on traffic and wood- and oil-burning heating in four major cities, with new rules for pregnant women, employees over 60, kindergartens, schools and construction firms. A topic that had been effectively nonexistent became one of the country's most important, and the government taking office that June named environmental policy among its first priorities.