Air pollution in Lahore, Pakistan

Lahore’s air quality worsened to 97.4 micrograms of PM2.5 particles per cubic metre, making it the most polluted city globally.

On Monday, the worst air quality was noted in the wee hours when the AQI US was 438, according to the iqair.com, which monitors the air quality across the world. At the time of filing this report, the air quality index of Lahore was hazardous 303. It should be noted that the air is safe to breath in only if the AQI US is up to 50. 

Individual areas of Lahore fared worse, with air quality near the Lahore Grammar School was 401 on the AQI US in real time (8pm) and Pakistan Engineering Services (Private) 366, CERP office 349, Syed Maratab Ali Road 340, DHA Phase-II 329 and Chatha Park 328.

The Environment Protection Department (EPD) own data, shared online, showed the worse air quality of Lahore at 309.

According to iqair.com, “air pollution in Lahore is caused by a combination of vehicle and industrial emissions, smoke from brick kilns, the burning of crop residue, general waste and dust from construction sites.

Lahore, along with the rest of Pakistan, desperately needs to shift away from its reliance on fossil fuels.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has set an ambitious target for Pakistan to generate 30 percent of its energy needs via renewable sources by 2030. Achieving this target will not be easy.

China has vowed to stop financing coal-fired energy projects abroad, but this announcement will probably not impact projects that are already in the pipeline, including another coal-fired plant in Arifwala, Punjab. As Pakistan's government also remains keen to exploit indigenous coal reserves to produce electricity, it has announced plans to mitigate pollution by potentially converting existing and future coal-fired plants into coal-to-liquid or coal-to-gas plants. Yet, environmentalists worry such processes are costly, water and energy intensive, and do not provide a sustainable solution to meet Pakistan's energy requirements.

“Misinformation is being spread about Lahore air quality,” the minister, Zartaj Gul Wazir wrote on Twitter, before going on to blame India for the majority of the air pollution afflicting Pakistan. “It is nowhere as bad as being asserted by vested elements.”

The term “vested elements” is code for Pakistan’s enemies, India chief among them.

Amnesty International issued an “urgent action” for Lahore, its first ever appeal for the population of an entire city. The rights group rebuked the Pakistani government for denying Lahore’s 11 million residents the ability to live in a healthy environment.

“The government’s inadequate response to the smog in Lahore raises significant human rights concerns,” said Rimmel Mohydin, a South Asia analyst at Amnesty International, in a statement. “The hazardous air is putting everyone’s right to health at risk.”

The Pakistani government must “stop downplaying the crisis and take urgent action to protect people’s health and lives,” the statement said.

The Pakistani government does not publish hourly updates on air pollution levels, and it has lowered its standards for what constitutes dangerous levels of air pollution, often citing as healthy levels that are considered dangerous internationally.

In her Twitter messages late last month, Ms. Wazir, the country’s minister of state for climate change, appealed to Pakistanis to “only use our data for information.” She added, “Lahore is not at all ranked the most polluted city in the world.”

The World Health Organization has said Pakistan’s air pollution likely causes 22,000 premature adult deaths every year.

Statistics vary, and global rankings are hard to compare, given widely different measurement protocols, but by almost any measure, Pakistan has some of the worst air quality in the world.

On average, Pakistanis are exposed to PM 2.5 levels more than 6.5 times the level determined safe by the World Health Organization. As a result, Pakistanis lose 2.5 years on their life expectancy.

Yet for citizens in Lahore, getting government agencies to respond to the crisis has proven an onerous battle.

Lahore's smog situation is a symptom of a much larger air pollution crisis which is persistent and toxic even when invisible to the naked eye.

According to the State of Global Air report on global exposure to air pollution and its disease burden, conducted by the Health Effects Institute in Boston, Pakistan's air quality has consistently been worsening for years, causing an estimated more than 135,000 deaths.

The mushrooming number of vehicles on the roads is one major source of air pollution. The growing quantity of dust in the air from massive infrastructure/housing scheme construction is another source, as is tree-cutting, which reduces the amount of CO2 being taken up by these plants and worsens soil erosion. Of course, there is also the smoke that is pumped into the air daily by the unregulated polluting factories.
While various government departments are legally bound to safeguard the health of the public and the environment, it is common knowledge that existing environmental legislation is not taken seriously. Therefore it comes as little surprise to see that the Punjab EPD's new 'Policy on Controlling Smog', a propaganda video tweeted by the Government of Punjab, as well as comments by the Minister of the Environment, Zakia Shah Nawaz, all shift a disproportionate amount of blame for the air pollution crisis onto Indian farmers burning their agricultural residues.

The only way out of this abyss is by addressing the air pollution crisis in lock-step with meaningful and coordinated strategies to provide a path for all Lahoris to have clean, affordable, and safe transport, housing, schools, water, and electricity, which will require creating an underlying logic that prioritizes the needs of people and the planet over private gain.

Toxic smog in Pakistan’s second largest city risks the health of its residents, but the government is failing to address the issue.

Pakistan's median exposure levels to fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) –  is 68 in urban areas, compared to just 12 in UK cities, according to the WHO (pdf). The WHO sets a standard safe PM 2.5 level at 25 µg/m3. Numbers rose above 100 in Lahore, according to the city's environment protection agency (EPA) data.