Safia Ramzan
If the Pakistan Air Quality Initiative emissions data mapping pollution across Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad Rawalpindi, and Peshawar is accurate, it should force a fundamental rethink of how Pakistan governs its air. If it is not accurate, it deserves to be challenged through stronger evidence, transparent methods, and peer reviewed counter analysis, not through politically convenient dismissal. The Punjab government’s immediate rejection of the findings raises a simple but uncomfortable question. Is the data wrong, or is the state unwilling to confront what it reveals about its own governance failures.
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The report’s core argument is clear and unsettling. Pakistan’s air pollution is not a single national cloud that can be addressed through uniform seasonal measures. It is a series of localised emergencies driven by distinct economic structures. Lahore’s pollution emerges from a dense mix of transport emissions, heavy industry, and brick kilns encircling the city. Karachi’s air is dominated by industrial activity, port operations, and energy intensive manufacturing. Islamabad and Rawalpindi suffer primarily from congestion and car dependent urban design. Peshawar’s geography, combined with transit trade and traditional industry, produces the highest per capita pollution burden in the country. Each city’s economic DNA produces a different emissions fingerprint.
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Methodologically, the study draws on satellite based aerosol measurements, chemical transport modelling, and PAQI’s own monitoring network. Its authors argue that most pollution is generated within Pakistan’s own airsheds rather than imported from across borders. They also draw attention to sources that remain poorly regulated and under measured, including household air pollution from biomass fuels, open waste burning, and crop residue burning. The conclusion is direct. The crisis is structural and local, and the central constraint is no longer lack of data but lack of political and administrative will.
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This is where Pakistan’s governance gap becomes most visible. One of the report’s authors describes the national response as a pattern of uniform bans and seasonal theatrics. This phrase captures years of reactive measures, including temporary school closures, short lived traffic restrictions, and symbolic enforcement drives. These actions treat smog as a seasonal inconvenience rather than a permanent public health emergency. If emissions profiles differ sharply by city, then blanket policies will always fail. Karachi’s industrial belt, Lahore’s kilns and transport network, Islamabad’s congestion, and Peshawar’s geography cannot be managed through identical winter orders. <br>
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The Punjab Environmental Protection Agency’s response highlights deeper institutional discomfort with data driven policy. The agency questioned PAQI’s estimates on vehicles and brick kilns and once again pointed towards India as the primary cause of Lahore’s pollution. At the same time, it claims that billions of rupees have been spent on emission controls and that most industries have installed mitigation equipment. Yet a separate Urban Unit study last year identified transport as a major polluter. When independent datasets are dismissed without transparent rebuttal and responsibility is shifted outward, coherent policy becomes impossible.
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This does not mean PAQI’s findings should be accepted without scrutiny. Emissions inventories are complex and models can be refined. If the government believes the data is flawed, it should commission its own independent, peer reviewed studies using clear methodologies and publish the results openly. What it cannot afford is denial. Pakistan’s cities and many rural areas are exposed to particle and gas concentrations high enough to shorten lives, increase disease burden, and reduce economic productivity. That reality should be the starting point for governance, not a political inconvenience.
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The report proposes interventions that align with global best practice. These include real time public access to air quality data, closing enforcement gaps, targeting super emitters, shifting industry and households to cleaner fuels, and gradually electrifying two and three wheelers that dominate urban mobility. None of these measures is radical. All require consistent regulation, institutional capacity, and political ownership rather than seasonal announcements and temporary bans.
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Ultimately, the real test is not whether every percentage point in the PAQI inventory survives technical debate. The test is whether the state is prepared to treat air pollution as a long term governance challenge rather than a weather event. That requires accepting uncomfortable data, designing city specific policies, and sustaining enforcement beyond the smog season. Pakistan’s air will not improve through denial. It will improve only when evidence, however inconvenient, is allowed to shape policy.
