The worsening state of our air

KARACHI:

If the air feels heavier these days, if breathing takes just a little more effort than it should, you’re not imagining things. That heaviness has a name—PM2.5—and right now, across most of urban Pakistan, it’s at levels no one should be breathing for long. Some cities have it worse than others​, much worse.

Check the data from IQAir, the Swiss firm that tracks this air quality, and you will find at least 17 urban centres across Pakistan where the air has registered as hazardous. Lahore, Bahawalpur, Gujranwala, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Gujrat, Hyderabad, Jhelum, Kasur, Mandi Bahauddin, Multan, Narowal, Peshawar, Rahim Yar Khan, Sargodha, Sialkot, Sukkur—the list reads like a census of where people actually live. Except for a few, most of these cities are in Punjab, our most populous province.

Numbers numb after a while, so here’s another way to understand it: IQAir also ranks cities globally by pollution. Out of 122 they monitored, Pakistan claims two spots in the top 20. Lahore at third and Karachi at 17th. On February 16, 2026—just six ago, with monitors showing real-time conditions—Lahore sat at the very top. The most polluted city in the world that day. Not an award or title any city wants to claim, but Lahore, it seems, makes it up there almost effortlessly around this time of the year.

But rankings only tell part of the story. The WHO says safe air means no more than 15 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter over 24 hours. Lahore is currently breathing about 20 times that, Faisalabad, 13 times, and Karachi nine times. Every breath, doctors caution, can carry microscopic shards of burnt fuel, construction dust, and crop smoke that most pulmonologists agree shouldn’t be in human lungs at all. You might want to assume this would trigger something, an official response, some aggressive action.

Go to the Ministry of Climate Change and Environmental Coordination’s website. The policies are there, four of them, sitting on the front page like exhibits in a museum. Clean Air Policy, Climate Change Policy, Electric Vehicles, and even on Forests. All of them were uploaded years ago. Nobody’s checked if they’re the latest versions. Nobody asked what happened next. Meanwhile, officials fly to global conferences to talk about how vulnerable Pakistan is to climate disasters. On the ground, the smog and pollution stays exactly where it was, year after year.

The air feels different now

Walk into any pulmonologist's clinic in Lahore these days and you will see the same scene – elderly patients struggling for breath, parents with asthmatic children, people whose pre-existing conditions have suddenly become emergencies. The doctors will tell you it is the air. It is always in the air starting from October.

Pakistan isn’t alone in this, if that’s any comfort. South Asia has a pollution problem that doesn’t respect borders. India’s cities regularly top the global charts. China’s industrial centres have their bad days too. But we’re not competing to be less polluted than our neighbours, we’re competing to breathe without damaging our lungs. Home to more than 251 million people, fifth most populous country in the world, and our urbanization, experts believe, has happened so fast, so unregulated, that environmental pressures were inevitable. Pollution, as one of them described it, is just the most visible one.

In 2019, the country’s average PM2.5 hit 65.81 μg/m³ which is firmly in the ‘unhealthy’ category. Globally, it placed us among the most polluted nations on earth. Seven of the ten most polluted cities in the world that year were in India. Lahore and Faisalabad made the list for Pakistan. The following year, India had 46 of the world's 100 most polluted cities. Pakistan had six. In 2021, AFP reported Lahore as the world’s most polluted city, citing the Swiss air quality monitors, while residents pleaded with the government to do something—anything. By 2023, the situation hadn’t improved enough to matter. Punjab declared a four-day holiday because the smog was so thick schools and markets had to close. Seven years later, little has changed. In 2024, Lahore ranked second globally, just behind New Delhi, and Karachi came in fourth.

So far in 2026, Lahore has clung to its spot as the second most polluted city in the world, though it and New Delhi keep swapping places like a sad game of musical chairs on IQAir’s real-time monitors. On February 20, Dhaka claimed the top spot, with Lahore and New Delhi close behind. That same day, Lahore’s AQI hit 203—deep in the ‘very unhealthy’ zone. PM2.5, the main culprit, soared to 128 µg/m³, dangerous for anyone, and potentially lethal for some.

If you’ve lived in Lahore long enough, you know the pattern by heart. October comes, the air starts to thicken, by December, the city disappears into a grey haze that smells faintly of smoke. By February, the city holds its breath, waiting for the annual smog nightmare to end. We’ve been doing this for years and the smog returns without fail, year after year.

From October through February, farmers across Punjab burn leftover crop stubble, sending smoke into the sky that drifts toward the city. Cold weather traps pollutants close to the ground, letting the haze linger longer than it should. The same story plays out every year, winter sets in, Lahore climbs the charts, firmly cementing its place among the world’s most polluted cities. Effortlessly and without fail.

Follow the smoke

In Pakistan’s major cities, the sources of pollution are consistent once you start paying attention to our national tragedy. Drive through any urban centre and you’ll smell it before you see it, exhaust fumes hanging in the air like a permanent fog. The reason isn’t complicated, we have built our streets for cars we can’t afford to maintain, Bedford trucks, manufactured from 1931 to 1986, that should have been retired decades ago, and motorbikes running on fuel that burns dirty because cleaner options cost more. Functional public transport? Still a promise—not even a distant reality, not even in major hubs like Karachi.

The burning of fuel in engines releases a toxic mix of gases and fine particulate matter. Black carbon forms when fossil fuels or organic materials burn incompletely. Wood and coal fires contribute, but vehicle emissions remain the largest single source, making urban air dangerously dense with harmful particles. Nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) and sulfur dioxide (SO₂) join the mix, much of it from vehicles. NO₂ concentrates in areas with heavy traffic, adding to what residents breathe every day.

Lahore’s air, for example, is thick with pollution from multiple sources, vehicles and factories, smoke from brick kilns, burning crop leftovers and trash, dust from construction sites. Large-scale deforestation to make way for roads and buildings only makes matters worse. Winter adds insult to injury—a weather phenomenon called temperature inversion traps pollutants close to the ground, keeping smog from dispersing.

Karachi, the 12th largest city in the world and Pakistan’s financial hub, has its own version of the same story. A densely populated port city, it always had a high volume of vehicles. Bikes, cars, same old Bedford trucks choke the roads, many of them far below any reasonable standard for pollution output. Diesel fuel remains common, which means higher emissions than cleaner alternatives. The city’s greenbelt, once a buffer against its own pollution, has been eaten away by development, encroachment operations, paved over for ‘progress’ while no one asked what would filter the air instead.

Rickshaws running on two-stroke engines contribute massively, according to experts who have studied this. Open burning of garbage adds more, plastic, synthetic materials, organic waste all releasing their own plumes of smoke. Factory emissions round out the mix. For the port city, October to January appear to be the worst months based on IQAir data, with January as the peak. Both Lahore and Karachi show deteriorating air quality over time and no signs of improvement, none at all.

Faisalabad, Pakistan’s industrial hub, struggles constantly with air that troubles its residents. On February 20, the city recorded an AQI of 218. The culprit isn’t mysterious, Faisalabad is packed with factories, garment units, textile mills, manufacturers of all kinds, pumping pollutants into the air around the clock. They call it the ‘Manchester of Pakistan.’ On that same day, the actual Manchester in England recorded an AQI of 71, comfortably in the moderate range. The gap isn’t just wide, it is damning, and it is dreadful. With PM2.5 levels ranging from 55.5 to 150.4 μg/m³, Faisalabad ranks as the fourth most polluted city in the world based on long-term data, and remains the second most polluted in Pakistan for a significant portion of the year.

Don’t hold your breath for a quick fix

The short answer about whether air quality will improve? No. Not until governments enforce strict monitoring across all major cities, collect data consistently, and make it available for research and policymaking. Right now, according to experts, that is not happening.

In Punjab, the provincial administration has made gestures—such as plans to replace government-owned vehicles with expensive electric ones. Experts call it ‘show-and-tell.’ A small percentage of cars on the road, swapped for EVs that most people can’t afford, while the larger fleet continues pumping emissions. Unless there is a widespread shift to cleaner vehicles, and that means affordable ones, Lahore’s emissions will not drop and that’s before considering all the other pollution sources.

The Swiss air-quality site says the first step is making real-time data available to everyone, with more detail than we currently get. When people actually know what they are breathing, they can protect themselves and it becomes easier to push for action.

Cutting emissions from cars and factories matters too. By late 2025, Punjab had set up 100 monitoring stations for its 127.7 million people. The WHO recommends one station per 250,000 to 500,000 people in urban areas. Do the math, it tells you how seriously this is being handled.

A couple of years ago, Pakistan ranked third globally for average AQI, behind only Chad and Bangladesh. Average AQI of 164. PM2.5 around 73.71 μg/m³, firmly unhealthy, and permanently so.

An analysis of readings from 2014 to 2024 shows Lahore alone comes in as the fifth most polluted city in the world, a list mostly dominated by Indian cities. Among the 50 worst-affected cities, at least nine are in Pakistan, Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan, Multan, Sialkot, Faisalabad. Pindi Bhattian, Charsadda, and Mangal. All of these are real places where real people live, work, raise children, and breathe air that damages them every single day.

We have known the answers for years

Pakistan won’t fix its air quality problem until it stops treating pollution like a seasonal event. Right now, our reality is that monitoring is minimal, scattered, and mostly out of sight.

Punjab has 100 air-quality stations for 127.7 million people. Sindh, according to independent estimates, has about 60 to 70 air quality measurement units, with 9 to 10 active monitoring stations in Karachi. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has approximately 17 to 20 active units reporting real-time data to international and national platforms. Balochistan has approximately 13 to 15 active real-time units reporting to major open-access platforms. Historically, the least-monitored province, recent government and non-profit initiatives have expanded its infrastructure. As of February 2026, the provincial administration has promised to install 10 additional units.

Compare these numbers to WHO guidelines and it’s clear how little is actually being monitored. Until we know exactly what is in the air, and until that data is shared in real time, both citizens and policymakers, experts warn, are shooting in the dark.

Vehicles are the most obvious problem across all major cities. In the absence of a functional transportation system, our roads stay clogged with cars, buses, trucks, motorbikes, rickshaws—many of them old, poorly maintained, running on cheap, polluting fuel. Diesel trucks, two-stroke engines, outdated cars pump black carbon, nitrogen oxides, and PM2.5 straight into the air. Vehicle inspectors will tell you this, so will anyone who has ever stood behind a bus at a stoplight.

For real impact, the country needs systemic changes such as better public transport, incentives for people to switch to cleaner vehicles. Until then, our streets remain smoke-filled, and our lungs, pulmonologists predict, will pay the price. Medical practitioners have stopped being surprised by this, they just treat the consequences.

Then there is industry, much of it is completely unregulated. Cities like Faisalabad, Gujranwala, and Karachi are industrial centres, and their factories belch smoke like it’s going out of style. Garment mills, brick kilns, industrial units of all kinds, most burning fossil fuels, running with hardly any check or balance to keep them in line.

On paper, we have emissions standards and environmental guidelines, but enforcement is weak at best. Policies without teeth are just paper tigers—scary on the page, ineffective in reality, as one expert put it. Real progress, he added, needs a mix of carrots and sticks. Subsidies for cleaner fuel, technical support for green technologies, fines or shutdowns for violators, small brick kilns, family-run businesses, tiny workshops, they all need to be part of the plan. Ignore them, and a big chunk of pollution stays unchecked, uninterrupted, and untouched.

The seasonal offenders, such as farmers, burn crop stubble every year. Plumes of smoke rise from fields and drift straight toward cities. Banning stubble burning has done almost nothing to prevent this. Farmers, one environmentalist said, need realistic alternatives, including machines that turn stubble into compost, animal feed, or biofuel could replace the fire. But only if the government backs them with subsidies, otherwise, every year it’s the same story, smoke in, haze out.

Environmentalists also point out that urban planning and greenery matter as much as regulation. Construction dust, deforestation, shrinking green spaces, all of it traps smog in the city. Trees filter harmful particles, improve airflow, and make urban life more breathable. But in Lahore, Karachi, and Faisalabad, too much greenery has been lost to roads, to buildings, and above all, to neglect.

Waste management gets overlooked, but it is still a huge factor. Open burning of trash releases toxic fumes from plastics, synthetics, and organic waste. Proper collection, recycling, even waste-to-energy systems could cut pollution while creating jobs. Combine that with cleaner industries and stricter vehicle rules, and you start to see a meaningful drop in PM2.5 and PM10 levels, the particles that make our air unbreathable on most days.

In Pakistan’s case, policy exists, mostly on paper. The National Clean Air Policy, the Climate Change Policy, the Electric Vehicle Policy, the Forest Policy, all promise the moon, but enforcement remains patchy at best. Many of these documents sit on the Climate Ministry’s main landing page, without anyone noticing whether they’re the latest versions or just left there for show.

Ministries, provincial and federal, according to independent researchers, must coordinate, set deadlines, make their progress visible and transparent. “Without follow-through, these documents remain ceremonial gestures, impressive, but useless.”

Pollution, one foreign expert noted, doesn’t care about borders, it doesn’t stop at them, and it can’t be contained by them. Dust, industrial emissions, crop fires from neighboring countries drift into Pakistan, adding to the haze. Working with India, China, others—sharing data, coordinating measures, learning best practices, he said, can help. “It’s not everything, but it is part of the puzzle,” he concluded.

Finally, immediate measures and awareness campaigns can save lives when, for example Lahore’s AQI hits 447, or Faisalabad goes even higher, crossing 500, as it did last October, authorities should warn residents. The elderly, children, and those with breathing issues, could stay indoors, schools may need to close and hospitals may need to prepare for a surge in respiratory cases.

These are stopgaps, yes, but people, a pulmonologist warned, can die breathing this air. “We see it every winter. Patients who were fine in September are in the ICU by December​, the air does that.” Action in real time, he ​added, matters as much as long-term strategies.