ISLAMABAD: Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Climate Change Malik Amin Aslam on Saturday said that tackling smog-forming pollutant sources was the most effective way to quell the growing challenge of smog that causes serious health and environmental hazards during winter.

Talking to Dawn, he pointed out that besides factories, aging urban transport system, burning of rice crop residue, dirty fuel sources in traditional brick kilns and solid waste were some of the factors that caused smog.

It starts blanketing the country’s various parts, particularly those in northern Punjab from November to March.

“Smog will continue to afflict the country’s public health, environmental and economic sectors as long as these very sources of smog remain unaddressed,” he cautioned.

Says factories, aging urban transport system, burning of rice crop residue behind pollution

Various human health problems such as emphysema, asthma, allergies, chronic bronchitis, lung infections, coughing, irritation of the eyes, chest, nose, throat infections and various cancers are caused or exacerbated by the effects of smog, Malik Amin Aslam maintained.

“Smog is highly attributed to the issues of birth defects and low birth weight,” the special assistant said.

Quoting a study published in the journal of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, he said that the research findings showed that cumulative exposure to air pollution impacts intelligence.

Another latest study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology, has also linked exposure to air pollution from burning fossil fuels to brain cancer, he highlighted.

The prime minister’s aide highlighted that emissions from the transportation sector resulting from fossil fuel combustion in cars, trucks, buses and motorbikes are the chief contributors of smog formation, most of which is formed in large cities as a result of traffic emissions.

Besides, the industrial processes employ a large amount of fossil fuels and resources that need to be extracted for the production of materials and goods. Thus, industries equally cause harmful gaseous emissions and fumes released into the atmosphere, which lead to the formation of smog.

“Most of the smog issue in Pakistan is linked to widespread stubble burning in northern Indian states of Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. Tens of thousands of farmers blaze their fields of old rice crop stubble to clear the fields of the crop residue materials and get them ready for growing wheat,” he remarked.

“However, the government is taking all possible measures to discourage stubble burning in the country to mitigate the exacerbating smog problem,” he said.

Malik Amin Aslam said that the use of the technology by farmers would help avoid burning of the paddy crop residue and convert the waste into organic fertilizer.

He further said that a project ‘mechanized management of rice crop residue’ had already been launched to tackle the smog problem in the country.

He claimed that outdoor air pollution, which gets aggravated during winter months because of smog, killed around 135,000 people, most of them children, annually in Pakistan.

“However, the bad air quality aggravated further due to smog may spike the death rate among the Covid-19 patients, which are on rise, particularly in the urban areas, where air pollution is worse than rural localities,” the PM’s aide said.

He suggested that efforts including curbing emissions from factories, closing brick kilns that failed to use fuel-efficient technology and refused to shift to the efficiently fuel-burning zig-zag technology and fining polluting vehicles and farmers burning rice stubble in the winter would be needed for effectively controlling the smog problem in particular and bad outdoor air pollution in general.

Published in Dawn, November 8th, 2020