Dark skies

Whenever news arrives that Pakistan has ascended in any particular ranking, it is more often than not for all the wrong reasons. This time, the country is climbing up global air pollution rankings. After finishing 2022 with the world third highest levels of air pollution, the 2023 IQAir World Air Quality Report, released on March 19, ranks the country a spot higher. Only Bangladesh had more polluted air than Pakistan in 2023 as per the report, with the country’s pollution levels around 14 times higher than the WHO PM2.5 annual guideline of 5 micrograms per cubic metre. In absolute terms, air pollution levels in Pakistan only rose slightly in 2023, indicating that we are falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to making improvements in air quality. The same can be said of the entire South Asian region, with 29 of the 30 most polluted cities in the world found in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar all have air pollution levels over 10 times higher than WHO guidelines while Islamabad exceeds this limit by around seven to 10 times. What this means for those living in these cities is life spans shortened by up to four years or even more, with particulate pollution reportedly second only to cardiovascular disease in terms of threat to public health.

This winter’s pneumonia outbreak in Punjab, where the seasonal blanket of smog combined with an unusually cold and dry winter to leave around 300 dead in January alone, arguably gave a practical demonstration of just how air pollution can shorten lives. As is often the case with public health threats, it is children, the elderly and other vulnerable populations that suffer the most. While South Asia has worse air than other regions in relative terms, the air pollution problem is global in scale with only seven countries meeting the WHO PM2.5 guidelines last year. The widespread nature of the problem, along with the fact that more polluted countries tend to cluster together points toward the fact that air pollution is an interconnected phenomenon. This should be intuitively obvious. Air does not recognize national borders and a polluted country will more often than not have highly polluted neighbours as well. Unfortunately, this creates ample space for politicians from different countries to point fingers rather than cooperate on more stringent emissions standards.

For instance, officials in Pakistan have been very vocal in pinning Lahore’s smog on the burning of agricultural waste by Indian farmers across the border. While this may technically be true, this does not give the country a pass when it comes to its own poor emissions standards, use of substandard fuels including wood, lack of public transport, and unsustainable urbanization which gobbles up all green space. And it is not as though Pakistani farmers do not also burn agricultural waste. It would be more productive and pertinent to recognize the cross-border nature of the problem and develop stricter regional pollution standards.