Lahore, Pakistan's
second-largest city, is one of the world's most polluted cities, according to
crowd-sourced data
Lahore, Pakistan's
second-largest city, is one of the world's most polluted cities, according to
crowd-sourced data.
On a December day in
Lahore, Pakistan's second-biggest city, the smog concealed tall buildings. Men
on motorbikes seemed to push through it as they rode. It reeked of diesel and
charcoal, compelling the Nadim family to go to the hospital.
"I can't breathe," said
Mohammad Nadim, 34. He gestured to his wife, Sonia. "My wife can't
breathe." She held their 3-month-old daughter Aisha, who pushed out wet,
heavy coughs. "But we are here for our children."
Air pollution is a
major public health problem across Pakistan, where an estimated 128,000 people
die annually from air pollution-related illnesses, according to the Global
Alliance on Health and Pollution.
But researchers say
the government has downplayed the severity of the problem for years, produced
unreliable data and sought to pass blame to neighboring India. Indeed, the
environmental protection department of Punjab, the province surrounding Lahore,
has not updated its air quality level for several weeks on its website,
reporting it at 166 – a level of airborne fine particulate matter that the U.S.
EPA considers to be "unhealthy" but which the Pakistani government
says is "satisfactory."
Parents drop off
children at a private school in Lahore. A group made up of volunteer mothers
known as "Scary Moms" is lobbying parents and schools to reinstate
buses to reduce emissions from cars driven by parents to drop off their
kids.
Parents drop off
children at a private school in Lahore. A group made up of volunteer mothers
known as "Scary Moms" is lobbying parents and schools to reinstate
buses to reduce emissions from cars driven by parents to drop off their kids.
In response, a growing
wave of clean-air activists — including
a group called the "Scary Moms," environmental lawyers, tech
entrepreneurs and even foreign embassies — is using new sources of pollution
data to pressure the government to take action. And it might be working — the
government is set to roll out a new series of policies aimed at improving air
quality.
The movement began
with a Pakistani engineer, Abid Omar, who in 2017 began crowd-sourcing data
from citizen-owned air quality monitors and uploading the information on
Twitter. Omar, who used to live in Beijing, said he was inspired by seeing how
citizen activism helped pressure the Chinese government to tackle air
pollution.
"We are utilizing
data coming out of this network to spread the message about how severe the air
pollution is, which we did not know until we had these monitors," Omar
says. "Just a very simple act has this huge impact."
Omar's initiative was
followed by the U.S. State Department, which erected monitors in the U.S.
Embassy in Islamabad and at its consulates — for U.S. citizens living in
Pakistan to have access to data about air pollution. Those figures are also
regularly tweeted out. They generally correlate with the citizen-sourced data.
