For years, by late autumn, the air over Lahore, Pakistan, was a seasonal weapon. A dense, copper-grey haze would settle over the streets, swallowing highways, schoolyards, and the horizon, reducing traffic lights to blinking, obscured fires. Commuters wore masks long before pandemics made them necessary. By night, hospitals consistently brimmed with coughing children and asthmatic elders.
For a decade, this was Punjab’s grim rhythm: the season of smog. But this winter, something unusual has happened. Lahore’s skyline: the minarets, the billboards, the trees that line the old Mall Road — is consistently visible. Flights are running. Schools are open. Behind this slow, verifiable transformation are two women whose leadership has quietly rewritten how environmental governance looks, feels, and operates in Pakistan.
A Breath of Accountability
“Clean air is not a privilege; it’s a right,” asserted Maryam Nawaz Sharif, Punjab’s Chief Minister, during a cabinet meeting in Lahore late last year. “And protecting that right is the duty of every government.”
When she took office, Punjab’s Air Quality Index (AQI) had been hovering in the hazardous zone for years. In November 2023, Lahore’s AQI hit 400, levels at which simply breathing outdoors is equivalent to smoking multiple cigarettes a day. Schools closed for days at a time. Emergency wards overflowed. For many, the crisis had begun to feel inevitable.
Sharif refused this inevitability. Within weeks, she declared smog control a “governance priority, not a seasonal ritual,” shifting the approach from palliative measures to systemic overhaul. Her government’s strategy was straightforward but radical for South Asia: make the invisible visible, make data public, and make citizens partners in accountability.
The result was a sweeping Air Quality Monitoring & Forecast System that linked 38 stations across the province. For the first time, residents could open their phones and see — in real time — the exact quality of the air they were breathing.
The Architects of Change
While Chief Minister Sharif provided political will, it was Marriyum Aurangzeb, Punjab’s Senior Minister for Environment Protection and Climate Change, who built the machine that turned that will into action. Standing before a bank of monitors at the Environment Protection Department headquarters, Aurangzeb described the change less as a campaign and more as a fundamental recalibration of priorities.
“Smog is responsible for over 250,000 deaths annually in Pakistan, according to WHO estimates,” she said at a press briefing last November. “This isn’t a winter problem. It’s a year-round challenge and we’ve given every department a roadmap.”
Her roadmap stitched together technology, policy, and behavioral economics. Fifteen fog cannon machines now spray ultra-fine mist along traffic corridors and construction belts, capturing particulate matter before it reaches the lungs. The Punjab AQI & Weather App, available in both Urdu and English, offers live readings, health advisories, and AI-generated forecasts.
Critically, when numbers spike, the government no longer responds with generic bans. It triggers data-led operations: targeted water-sprinkling, industrial checks, vehicle testing, and community alerts pushed through mobile networks.
Enforcement, but With Empathy
Across South Asia, environmental enforcement often feels punitive: relying on raids, fines, and closures. Punjab’s new approach, under Aurangzeb’s direction, looks intentionally different.
The province now has an Environment Protection Force comprising multiple squads: the Black Squad for vehicular emissions, the Red Squad for industrial waste, and the Anti-Dust Squad for construction pollution. But alongside the inspectors came incentives and support systems, though critics argue the fines remain too low to truly deter powerful industrial players.
Crucially, instead of criminalizing impoverished farmers for burning rice stubble, the government offered them 5,000 Super Seeder machines on a 60% subsidy, enabling them to prepare soil without setting fields ablaze.
“We will not punish farmers for being poor,” Aurangzeb said while launching the program. “We will empower them to be part of the solution.”
Satellite data shows the policy working: a 40% decline in stubble-burning incidents compared to the previous year. The air, quite literally, began to clear.
Punjab’s climate strategy is not confined to ministries. Its most innovative element lives in chat windows. The province’s Smog Chatbot, integrated with WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook, allows anyone to report violations, a smoky vehicle, an illegal kiln, an open fire by sending a photo and location. The complaint routes automatically to the relevant district officer, who must act and report closure back to the citizen.
Within its first three months, the system has handled more than 80,000 interactions, achieving a 95% automated resolution rate. For a region where bureaucratic response times were once measured in weeks, the immediacy felt revolutionary.
“Technology alone doesn’t fix systems,” Maryam Nawaz told provincial officials during a review meeting. “People do. But technology helps us see what we used to ignore.”
Measured Momentum
Average AQI (Lahore, Oct–Dec): Down from 249 in 2023 to 182 (preliminary 2025 season) – a 27% improvement.
- Hospital respiratory cases: Down 38%.
- School closure days: Reduced from 18 to 6 per season.
- Industrial compliance: Up to 71% (up from 45%).
- Public outreach: More than 7 million citizens reached through awareness campaigns.
These numbers signal the first battle in a long war to be won. They mark measurable, verifiable momentum, a rare thing in the slow-moving world of environmental reform.
An Iterative Approach
Observers have labeled this an iterative style of governance, defined by its mix of transparency, accountability, and data-driven precision, and driven by a willingness to listen.
When citizens complained that fog-cannon sprays made roads slippery, the Environment Department adjusted schedules within days. When confusion arose over school closures, the Chief Minister’s Office published AQI-based thresholds online for transparency. The response was adaptive.
This tone of listening rather than dictating may be Punjab’s most significant cultural shift. It suggests that governance, when humanized and made responsive, becomes not softer but smarter.
Still, the Air Is Only Beginning to Clear
Challenges remain: aging vehicles, unregulated roadside brick kilns, and weather inversions that trap pollutants for days. Smaller districts struggle with enforcement capacity. And for many urban poor who live near industrial zones, progress feels slower than the headlines suggest.
Aurangzeb acknowledges this with characteristic candor. “Smog mitigation is not seasonal,” she said during a recent review. “It’s systemic. This isn’t about a cleaner December, rather about a cleaner decade.”
That long view is rare in politics anywhere, rarer still in regions fighting economic and climate pressures at once.
Why It Matters Beyond Punjab
Punjab’s transformation is more than a provincial success story. It is a vital model for how developing regions can use data, technology, and empathetic policy to fight climate and public health pressures. It proves that environmental change begins with governance that empowers citizens to see, measure, and question the air around them.
On a recent morning in Lahore, sunlight finally pierced the haze after weeks, and commuters returned to the streets without masks. For Punjab, that visible change: the clear, pale-blue sky above the rooftops is the clearest sign yet that the decade of darkness is finally lifting, offering a sustainable blueprint for other regions fighting similar climate and pollution pressures.
