In 2014, the World Health Organization reported that New Delhi was one of the most polluted cities in the world, with dangerous levels of fine particulate matter pollution, known as PM2.5. Ever since, New Delhi has been synonymous with hazardous air quality.
Over the last few years the air quality levels in one of the world’s fastest growing metropolises have ebbed and flowed, but for the most part New Delhi’s pollution levels remain higher than most cities across the world.
Now, the Swedish air quality monitoring company IQAir has released its annual World Air Quality report for the year 2021, again ranking New Delhi among the most polluted cities in the world and the most polluted capital city for a fourth consecutive year. IQAir also found that South Asia was the world’s most polluted region, where PM2.5 emissions from vehicle exhaust, commerce, the burning of stalks and other crop residue after harvest season and in-home cooking with solid fuels all combine to dangerously degrade air quality.
“You can barely see the leaves anymore, there’s a layer of dust that covers them all the time,” said Renu Singh, 39, a Ph.D student at Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi, describing the visible effects of air pollution in the city.
Singh, who has lived in Delhi for most of her life, has seen the city grow into a metropolitan area of more than 30 million people. Data suggests Delhi’s population will likely surpass Tokyo’s by the year 2030 and reach 39 million. And as the city continues to grow, so does its air pollution problem.
According to the 2019 Air Quality Life Index published by the University of Chicago, residents in Delhi would lose more than nine years of life expectancy if pollution levels from 2019 persist. The World Health Organization associates many short- and long-term health risk factors with exposure to PM2.5, tiny droplets of pollution smaller than 2.5 microns—about one-thirtieth the diameter of a human hair—that irritate the eyes, nose and lungs, aggravate asthma and other respiratory diseases and increase the risk of death from lung cancer and heart disease.
These particles come from vehicle exhaust, the burning of fuels such as wood, heating oil or coal, and natural sources such as grass and wildfires.
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The University of Chicago Air Quality Life Index estimates hazardous air quality levels have reduced life expectancy throughout the Indo-Gangetic plain by seven years. One of the most densely populated regions in the world, the plain is home to more than 500 million people and the hub for small, medium and large scale economic activity in South Asia.
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99 percent of the world’s population now lives in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution according to the World Health Organization’s new findings released prior to World Health Day. The data was evaluated using WHO’s 2021 guidelines that use more stringent criteria.
The pollutants known as PM2.5 and PM10 and nitrogen dioxide are released into the air from the burning of fossil fuels. According to the Air Quality Life Index released by the University of Chicago, Pakistan ranks as the world’s fourth most polluted country with 99 percent of its population living in areas where levels of pollution exceed even Pakistan’s own air quality standard.
While cities in Punjab fare the worst, estimates suggest that even Karachi residents will end up gaining 3.6 years in life expectancy if particulate pollution is brought down to WHO recommended levels.
As reported by Dawn, PMA secretary general Dr Qaiser Sajjad expressed concern over the recent data and said that air pollution is a major problem contributing to one in 10 deaths in children under the age of five in Pakistan.
Toxic fumes from factories, vehicles, generators and burning of waste are the major culprits.
“Many people don’t know that the generators they are running without filters in hours of load-shedding are not only creating noise pollution, but also contaminating the air,” he added.
The Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) urged the government and private sector entities to take steps to deal with this major public health challenge by curbing the rising levels of air pollution.
Continue Reading at Mashable Pakistan…
Pakistan has ordered private offices and schools to remain closed on Mondays in Lahore in the hope that a three-day weekend will help reduce toxic levels of smog in the country’s second-largest city.
The directive, issued by Punjab relief commissioner Babar Hayat Tarar, aimed to act “as a preventive and speedy remedy” during the winter smog season and will last until 15 January.
Lahore was temporarily declared the most polluted city in the world by an air quality monitor earlier on Wednesday, as residents complain of shortness of breath, stinging eyes and nausea from thick, acrid pollution.
Last week, the air quality index in the city of about 12 million people was ranked at 348, much above the hazardous level of 300, according to IQAir, the Swiss technology company that operates the AirVisual monitoring platform. Since then, Lahore has been overtaken by Delhi, India, which ranked at 422. The number is a calculation based on the level of several pollutants in the air.
Pakistan has witnessed the worst air pollution in recent years from Karachi to Lahore, as a mixture of low-grade diesel fumes, smoke from seasonal crop burn off, and colder winter temperatures coalesce into stagnant clouds of smog.
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On average, Pakistanis are estimated to lose two years of their life due to air pollution. But Lahore suffers the worst, with the average resident losing 5.3 years of their lives, claims the report on air quality life index , produced by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.
The information minister, Fawad Chaudhry, has blamed previous authorities for smog in Lahore. “We see Lahore engulfed by fog every winter due to the past rulers of the city, who had cut trees for erecting a jungle of concrete there which badly affected the green cover of Lahore and its surroundings,” he said on Saturday.
Rimmel Mohydin, a south Asia analyst at Amnesty International, said the smog crisis was a human rights issue, given that it impedes the right to health. “People should not be endangered by the air they breathe. If the expertise is available, if the consequences are dire, if the evidence of the damage is mounting, then the government must not waste time initiating smog protection protocol.”
Malik Amin Aslam, climate change adviser to the prime minister, Imran Khan, said the government was working on the recommendations of the smog action committee. “We are doing everything possible,” he said.
Aslam said that without regional efforts between India and Pakistan the issue of the smog cannot be tackled, as the crops are burned off on the other side of the border. “We have put this request for a dialogue between regional countries during Cop26 (climate summit). Hopefully, it will take place.”
However, Rafay Alam, a lawyer and environmental activist said that while there was a need for dialogue with India and regional countries, the smog cannot be blamed on Pakistan’s neighbours.
“There is no overnight solution to the problem. The government has to improve fuel quality and shift to renewable energy, and provide pollution control devices for the industries..”
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The very act of breathing is killing us
Precisely one week ago, China’s capital city went into high alert about its dangerously deteriorating air quality. The municipal government in Beijing immediately clamped down on unnecessary traffic, shut down some major highways, closed all children’s playgrounds, and warned citizens to stay indoors until the crisis could be brought under control.
Beijing’s administrative authorities responded with such alacrity because the AQI (air quality index) had soared to 220, which is considered to be just one step below full-scale emergency in that country.
Here’s the kicker. On that very same day, it was business as usual in New Delhi, even though its own AQI was hovering at an abysmal 313. And many other cities across the subcontinent were even worse, with Meerut peaking at an almost unbelievable 440.
All this was just one more lowlight, in an unremitting pageant of bad news for all of us in South Asia. There is no getting around the facts. When it comes to this most vital category of health — the literal air that we breathe — our part of the world performs worst, right across the board.
Thus, at the very moment of my writing — noon on November 11 — the worst AQI of any city on the planet is in Lahore (468), followed by New Delhi (265). Also, in the bottom ten are Karachi (175), Mumbai (162) and Dhaka (157).
According to IQAir, the Swiss technology experts who maintain the excellent AirVisual real-time air quality information platform (www.iqair.com), amongst the 30 cities with the worst air quality in the world in 2020, an appalling 20 were in India alone, along with Manikganj and Dhaka in Bangladesh, and Lahore, Bawahalpur, and Faisalabad in Pakistan.
Aggregated slightly differently by country, which takes into account many additional locations outside the major cities, the IQAir results are not particularly different. The three worst polluted in the world are ranked like this: Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India.
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Just a few weeks ago in September, the University of Chicago released its Air Quality of Life Index, which warned that all across Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, the average citizen would live an astonishing 5.6 additional years, if air pollution was curbed to meet WHO guidelines.
If the levels of pollution persist at 2019 levels (actually they have become significantly worse) the residents of Delhi and Kolkata will lose 9 years of life expectancy. For Dhaka, that number is an equally unpalatable 7.7 years.
It doesn’t always have to be this way.
For an example of how to turn things around, we only have to look at Beijing. From being the international byword for toxic air at the turn of the new millennium, it has brought the situation well under control. In the 2020 data from IQAir, the giant Chinese capital isn’t even in the worst 100 cities in the world.
The same can happen everywhere, it takes only political will along with visionary leadership.
When the University of Chicago released its index earlier this year, Michael Greenstone, the director of its Energy Policy Institute, summarized the situation very nicely: “High levels of air pollution are a part of people’s lives in [South Asia], just as they were in the US, England, Japan, and other countries in the past. The last several decades have seen tremendous progress in many of these countries, but this progress did not happen by accident — it was the result of policy choices.”
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Air quality impacts our health, our quality of life and even the length of our lives. Most people don’t think about what’s in the air they breathe — but perhaps they should.
That’s the driving force behind the Pakistan Air Quality Initiative. The citizen science project wants to let people know what’s in their air. While living in Beijing, a city known for poor air quality, Abid Omar became curious about the air that he and the people around him were inhaling every day. He brought this curiosity with him to Pakistan.
Omar bought several air quality monitors and soon realized that the air quality around him in the city of Karachi was notably poor. In fact, it was bad enough that in other countries the government would have shut down schools and kept people inside. With further research, Omar realized that Pakistan was suffering from a lack of data. The most recent studies conducted were outdated and insufficient. The researchers had only targeted the cities of Karachi and Lahore, and they dated back to 2008 and 2011. The study focusing on Lahore used only two weeks of data. Omar realized that no one, not even the government, was monitoring Pakistan’s air quality.
Yet there was ample evidence that air pollution was causing serious health problems. The medical journal Lancet reported in 2015 that more than 310,000 deaths in Pakistan each year can be tied to poor air quality. That’s 22 percent of all annual deaths in Pakistan. On average, people living in Pakistan have their life expectancy reduced by 2.6 years due to poor air quality, with that number reaching up to roughly 5 years in the heavily-populated Punjab region, according to the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.
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