Last month, Lahore was designated the world’s most polluted city. When the air quality index (AQI) reached 1,165 and kept climbing for most of November, it was more than 120 times the UN-recommended safe level. NASA and the UN said the smog was even visible from space.
Not only had the pollution come earlier than expected, it was also at its highest level in five years. Provincial officials in Punjab, of which Lahore is the capital, took some urgent measures, invoking what they dubbed a “green lockdown” of Pakistan’s second most populous city. Schools were cancelled. Universities were moved online. Parks, museums, zoos, and historical monuments were all shut. Rickshaws, a popular mode of transportation in the congested city, were banned. Barbecues, both at restaurants and personal picnics, were forbidden.
But for the city’s 13 million residents, all these actions were far too little, far too late. Millions of people were taken to hospitals for pollution-related illnesses. The World Bank estimates that pollution reduces Pakistan’s GDP by more than $22 billion each year. And farmers say the smoke that fills the air even affects photosynthesis and crop growth.
“The smog in Punjab is a dangerous cocktail of poor policy and natural climatic phenomena,” Maryam Khan, a climate policy consultant and founder of Climate News Pakistan, told The New Humanitarian.
Pakistan produces only a small amount of global greenhouse emissions, around 1%, but it borders one of the world’s largest polluters, India, so its 250 million people are vulnerable to the pollution effects not only of flawed domestic policies but also of those across the region.
For decades, each year, carbon emissions from vehicles, industries, and crop burning have been accumulating largely unchecked across South Asia. In the winter months, lasting from October to January, the winds in the region become denser, reacting with these emissions to create a thick, hazardous cloud that hangs over the largest cities, Khan explained.
During the smog season, the Pakistani government does now impose traffic restrictions and even closes motorways. But Ahmad Rafay Alam, a climate lawyer based in Lahore, said that despite all of the direct adverse effects, decision-makers in Pakistan tend to play the underdog and frame pollution and climate change as a problem imposed upon them by other, more powerful countries.
“One of the foundations of Pakistan’s climate policies is that we are not a big producer, but this is our own air pollution,” Alam said. “It is very much an indigenous problem.”
“Like smoking a giant cigarette for months”
Over the first two months of 2024, more than 5,000 children were treated for pneumonia in Punjab hospitals. Alam said many of these cases can be traced back to unclean air.
Millions of adults are impacted by the damaging financial hits, but they also feel health effects from the pollution too.
Muhammad told The New Humanitarian how he continued to work on a construction site in Lahore through mid-November even when the authorities placed a one-week suspension on non-essential construction to limit dust levels.
“If we stay home because of the smog or rain, who will feed our children,” he said. “It’s painful and irritating, especially for the eyes and throat, but we are mazdoor, workers, and majboor, obligated,” said the 27-year-old who asked only for his first name to be used due to his fear of being in violation of the bans.
As daily wage earners, Muhammad and his colleagues are among the millions of Pakistanis who are the hardest hit by a cost of living crisis stoked by rampant inflation, which hit 37.8% last May. This means they have no choice but to work in the open, polluted air.
“One of my friends fell sick last week, but he's back at work today, coughing uncontrollably,” Muhammad said, speaking at the height of the mid-November lockdowns.
The fact that Lahore was engulfed by a choking yellow haze just as representatives from more than 200 countries convened in Baku, Azerbaijan to negotiate global climate policies at the COP29 summit didn’t go unnoticed by Pakistani climate activists.
“Think of it as Lahore smoking a giant cigarette for months, and the city's residents becoming passive smokers, inhaling dangerous pollutants daily. This toxic air deteriorates health and significantly reduces quality of life,” Khan said.
For Pakistan’s climate activists, the government isn’t doing nearly enough to tackle the issue, or to increase awareness of the grim reality of pollution across South Asia, especially given the fact that Lahore’s new air quality record was broken only four days later by the Indian capital, Delhi.
The dirty haze is increasingly being described as a "fifth season", not just in Pakistan but across South Asia. "People have become so accustomed to it that they now see an AQI under 1,000 as acceptable. This normalisation is alarming," said 22-year-old climate activist Hania Imran.
Time to unify the region behind action
At the height of the pollution, authorities in the Pakistani side of Punjab called for “climate diplomacy” with their Indian counterparts, only 25 kilometres from Lahore.
“The winds don’t know there’s a border in the middle,” Punjab’s Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz said of the need for engagement between the decades-long rivals.
Pakistan may be one of the lowest global polluters, but India ranks third in the world, behind only China and the United States. Consequently, what happens in India invariably affects Pakistan, especially as the nation’s mountains can block dirty air from reaching the ocean.
Alam, the environmental lawyer and activist, put it simply: “It’s not a Lahore issue. It’s not a winter issue. It’s a Kabul to Calcutta issue. It’s a year-long issue.”
However, Alam said he has little faith that Pakistan and its neighbours will take any meaningful steps to address the issue, in part because leaders in the region have made a habit of enacting emergency measures several times a year then quickly moving on.
“Once the wind blew everything away, everyone in government heaved a sigh of relief,” Alam said, stressing that this mentality ignores the fact that by the end of November – even after they had reduced – pollution levels in much of Pakistan and India were still five to six times higher than those deemed safe by the World Health Organization.
Past attempts to try and unify the region around the issues of pollution and climate change have failed to reach the implementation stage, noted Alam, adding: “In the 1990s, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation tried to create a regional air monitoring system, and that went nowhere.”
On the home front, Khan said climate change must be brought into Pakistan’s classrooms – something she said would help the wider population take the issues of pollution and climate change more seriously in the future.
“Climate change is not integrated into school curriculums or public discourse as a critical subject, which hinders sector-specific awareness, like its impact on health or industries,” Khan said.
If their neighbours won’t or can’t enact their own policies, Pakistan must start to look at what they can do themselves to try and mitigate the pollution over their own skies, Alam said, listing a host of measures it could undertake:
Improving the quality of fuel
Setting up internal air quality monitoring systems
Upgrading refineries; phasing out coal and moving towards renewable energy sources
Cutting down on crop burning
Increasing public transportation services
Changing the layout of the nation’s congested urban centres
“This is not a short-term or cheap solution. It took us years to get here, it will take years to get us out of here,” Alam said.
But he acknowledged that even if the government was to take pollution and climate change more seriously, Pakistan has deeper societal and political problems that will act as hindrances. Over the last year, the government has responded to a proliferation of protest movements with heavy-handed shutdowns, mass detentions, and even violence.
Additionally, the economy has yet to recover from years of slow growth, low income, and high inflation. A recent $7 billion IMF loan was met with widespread protests after people realised it would mean 40% tax hikes. “It’s not [going to] be cheap, but it is imperative that the government works with the private sector to find solutions,” said Alam.
Edited by Andrew Gully.
