Islamabad:Pakistan’s recently recorded air quality is 15 times higher than the safe limit in some areas, which is a big danger to human health, reveals an unpublished National State of Environment Report (NSOER) to be launched soon.
At a consultation session, organised here jointly by United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in collaboration with Ministry of Climate Change, the researchers discussed in detail the troubling new findings of the report that mainly focuses on the youth.
The session aimed at gathering youth input for the upcoming report coming nearly a decade after Pakistan's last State of Environment Report was published in 2016 that had no dedicated youth edition.
Speaking on the occasion, Zainab Naeem from SDPI said the youth engagement process would directly feed into a standalone version of the national report giving younger citizens a formal voice in a process that historically excluded them.
She said that the gap is now being addressed as part of a broader push to involve young people directly in shaping national environmental policy. Neelum Pari also from SDPI explained that the methodology allows researchers to trace environmental degradation from its root socio-economic causes through to the policy responses meant to address it. Among the most striking revelations was the state of Pakistan's air quality. According to the findings presented, concentrations of PM2.5, fine particulate-matter considered especially dangerous to human health, recorded at up to 15 times the safe limit in some areas, with little to no improvement recorded between 2023 and 2024.
Citing global research, she noted that Pakistanis are losing an estimated 3.4 to 3.9 years of life expectancy on average due to air pollution, with South Asia among the worst-affected regions globally. She said that the full implementation of Pakistan's existing National Clean Air Policy could cut PM2.5 emissions by 36 to 38 per cent by 2030 and as much as 80 per cent by 2050 provided the policy is properly enforced, which was currently lacking.
Beyond air quality, the report's findings span twelve chapters covering water resources, agriculture, disaster risk, environmental health and governance and accountability including data on environmental compliance cases registered nationally. The report reveals that data gaps across provinces meant some regions, particularly the Punjab, were more heavily represented than others.
