Air Pollution

Penalties alone do not clear Punjab’s winter smog. Crop residue has an economic life, and the response has to meet farmers there.

During winter, cities in Punjab live through dangerous smog. Lahore’s air quality index has reached 1900 in bad episodes, with PM2.5 far above the level the World Health Organization treats as safe. That air reaches lungs, and it also reaches the food system.

An internship with the Environment Protection and Climate Change Department in Faisalabad, from August to October 2026, took the writer through industrial units and brick kilns. What was on the ground did not match what the monitoring story suggested after dark.