Furhan Hussain moved to Islamabad seeking fresher air, only to find Pakistan’s leafy capital in a semi-permanent haze. Frustrated, he joined a vanguard of citizens monitoring pollution themselves amid a void in government data.
Fast-growing Pakistan is home to more than 200 million people and suffers from some of the worst air pollution in the world, thanks to its giant population plying poorly maintained vehicles on the roads and unchecked industrial emissions.
Nations such as India and Sri Lanka publish statistics or warnings to help citizens cope when air pollution gets to dangerous levels.
Photo: Bloomberg
However, Pakistan is “one of few countries who do not monitor air quality”, said Hussain, of the informal PakAirQuality network, a group of concerned citizens monitoring pollution in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, and publishing their data on Twitter.
The lack of official information means citizens may be unaware of what they are breathing in, and without irrefutable data charting the scale of the problem it can be difficult to effect change.
The issue is acute in developing Pakistan, where emissions standards often go ignored partly because of a belief the country cannot afford to hamper its economic growth, Imran Saqib Khalid of the Islamabad-based Sustainable Development Policy Institute said.
Government policies do not outline a long-term strategy or move towards renewables. Instead, Pakistan is building 13 coal-fired power plants with Chinese assistance under a US$50 billion investment plan.
Officials insist that these will not affect air quality.
“Usage of ultra critical technology has been ensured to reduce emissions,” a Pakistani Ministry of Climate Change official told reporters.
Without data, it can be impossible to prove otherwise.
The situation becomes particularly dire in the north during winter, when cities are blanketed in thick toxic smog reminiscent of Victorian England’s “pea soup fog.”
World Bank estimates show that residents of the northwestern city of Peshawar, for example, breathe an annual average of 110 cubic micrometres of fine particulate matter — tiny pollutants that reduce visibility and reach deep into the respiratory tract.
That is more than 11 times the recommended upper limit and is believed to be a factor in almost 60,000 deaths from related diseases each year, including lung and heart diseases, asthmas and cancers.
Data is collected via mobile monitoring stations, but “not regularly,” Pakistani Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Director-General Farzana Altaf Shah said
“If government is not doing so, citizens themselves have to do it and generate data to show how bad the situation is,” Hussain said.
Ali Nadir, a Lahore-based businessman who is part of the PakAirQuality network, said they use “nodes” which can monitor air quality and share the data in real time through smart phones.
The idea originally came from a Pakistani national living in China, who showed his friends the cheap technology.
“The basic purpose is to raise awareness among people about the air quality, because you cannot rely on the government,” Nadir said.
“Many people have told me that they follow my tweets about air quality and sometimes, if the reading is too high and beyond safe level, they adjust their exercise schedule and plan going out accordingly,” he said.
The network hopes to build on the groundswell of awareness, Nadir said.
Meanwhile, Shah said there is some cause for hope, with a move toward higher fuel standards and the setting of pollution control units in Islamabad factories.
“It is a slow process, but it is there,” Shah said.
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