Pakistan’s air pollution crisis is routinely framed as an environmental emergency. In reality, it is far more revealing: a prolonged collapse of governance that has quietly shortened lives, hollowed institutions, and normalised state abandonment as public policy.

Pakistan’s first National Air Pollution Assessment, produced by the Pakistan Air Quality Initiative (PAQI), quantifies this collapse with devastating clarity. More than 100,000 premature deaths annually. Nearly four years have been erased from average life expectancy. Cities where air quality violates World Health Organization limits not episodically, but almost permanently. The report has rightly been hailed as a landmark for evidence-based policymaking.

Its deeper significance lies elsewhere. In both what it documents and how the state responds, the assessment functions as an X-ray of the Pakistani state, exposing not only polluted air, but institutional failure, intellectual paralysis, and a political economy that converts public suffering into private gain.

PAQI’s work is scientifically rigorous, drawing on satellite-derived aerosol data, chemical transport modelling, and the country’s largest open-access air-quality monitoring network. This is precisely the work that state institutions, the federal and provincial environmental protection agencies and the Ministry of Climate Change were created, funded, and mandated to perform.

This is not collaboration. It is a substitution. Civil society has done the job of the state because the state did not.

The official response confirms the indictment. Rather than engaging substantively with the findings, the Punjab Environmental Protection Agency, responsible for Lahore, repeatedly ranked among the world’s most polluted cities, resorted to denial and deflection. Its spokesperson questioned data sources, demanded laboratory disclosures, and cast doubt on researchers who had done what the agency itself failed to do for decades.

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This was not scientific scepticism; it was bureaucratic insecurity disguised as scrutiny. Confronted with evidence that toxic air has reduced life expectancy by nearly four years, the institutional reflex was not to ask how policy should change, but to ask who had authorised the exposure.

That Punjab alone chose public confrontation is telling. PAQI’s assessment was........

© The Friday Times