In the News
January 19, 2025
By Taha Ali, Umair Shahid, Rida Tayyab, Noor Fatima and Abeha Hussain
Smog season is here to stay.
For four long months, from October to January, a heavy pall shrouds the hills and plains, from Peshawar in the north all the way down to Larkana in the south, choking the life and spirit out of millions of hapless souls. Social media is abuzz. News articles describe the air as “methane-laden.” A WhatsApp message from Lahore reads: “It’s like inhaling directly from a car exhaust.”
In terms of scope, we have utterly shattered all records. The Air Quality Index (AQI) level — a measure of the concentration of fine-grained particulate matter in the atmosphere — deems a value of 50 or less as “good” and 300 or more as “hazardous” to health. This season we have registered AQI levels in excess of 1,000 as a matter of routine. Hospital admittances have skyrocketed. Multan even jumped the 2,000 mark.
In the visuals, the affliction is apocalyptic. In November, drone footage of Lahore went viral, the once-renowned “City of Gardens” resembling a dark Hollywood dystopia, a setting right out of Blade Runner. International media reported that the smog over Punjab was viewable from space. The satellite images captured an unnatural alien white patch, like factory chemical discharge in water, a seething living presence.
Smog has become a global phenomenon over the last few years, pervading the world silently, affecting billions, but it is most concentrated here now — a narrow strip stretching from Dhaka in the east to Islamabad and Peshawar in the west, with the epicentre concentrated in Delhi and Lahore.
The University of Chicago Energy Policy Institute, the leading air pollution tracking unit in the world, estimates that air pollution now cuts lifespans globally by 2.3 years, surpassing cigarettes and tobacco, which clock in at 2.2 years. Air pollution kills more than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. It may even be worse than war.