Islamabad’s air problem is not Lahore’s air problem, and policy that treats them the same will keep failing both cities.
The Pakistan Air Quality Initiative’s national landscape report, released in December 2025, broke down PM2.5 sources city by city for the first time. In Lahore, industry and brick kilns drive the numbers, with transport responsible for 35 per cent of particulate pollution. In Karachi, industrial activity and port operations drive it, at 49 per cent. In Rawalpindi-Islamabad, transport alone accounts for 53 per cent. The twin cities do not have a generic smog crisis. They have a traffic crisis that is also a public health crisis.
The health and economic toll behind that number is real, though it gets reported in ways that confuse more than they clarify. The Pakistan Economic Survey 2025-26 puts annual deaths linked to air pollution at 22,000. The National Clean Air Policy cites 235,000 premature deaths a year. Both figures are legitimate. They measure different things. The first counts outdoor air-pollution deaths using one methodology. The second follows the Global Burden of Disease approach, which counts a broader population exposed to more pollutants, including ozone.
Newspapers and officials cite both without saying so, which makes the data look unreliable when the real problem is that nobody explains which number answers which question. The World Bank’s estimate is harder to dispute either way: air pollution costs Pakistan close to 6.5 per cent of GDP annually in health spending and lost productivity.
So, the diagnosis is not in doubt. What happens next is where things fall apart, and Islamabad’s own record from last winter shows why. In late 2025, Pak-EPA ran a publicised crackdown on smoke-emitting vehicles in the capital. A week-long enforcement drive that concluded on October 30 fined 21 vehicle owners and impounded three vehicles, according to Pak-EPA’s own account carried by the Associated Press of Pakistan. The same report cited Pak-EPA’s survey finding that one in five heavy vehicles in Islamabad exceeds national emission standards. Islamabad has tens of thousands of heavy vehicles. Twenty-one fines in a week is a press event with a van and a camera crew. The law already exists. What is missing is the staffing and testing capacity to apply it at the scale the violation rate demands, year-round, not as a seasonal campaign timed to smog headlines.
There is a second problem underneath the enforcement gap, and it is a question of incentives rather than capacity. Pakistan’s fuel subsidies to the transport sector rose from roughly $2.4 billion between 2010 and 2015 to $7.8 billion between 2016 and 2023, according to transport emissions data compiled by the Asian Transport Observatory.
At the same time, the government is financing its New Energy Vehicle Policy 2025-30, which targets 30 per cent electric vehicle sales by 2030, partly through a 1-3 per cent levy on new combustion vehicle sales. In plain terms, the state keeps fuel artificially cheap with one hand while taxing new combustion vehicles to fund a shift away from them with the other. The two cancel out. A driver facing subsidised fuel prices has little reason to care about a small levy on a car purchase five years out.
Even if that contradiction were resolved, electric vehicles alone would not finish the job, and this is where the public conversation usually stops. Tire wear, brake wear and resuspended road dust, none of which an electric motor eliminates, already made up 35 per cent of road transport’s particulate emissions in Pakistan by 2022, up from 24 per cent in 2010, per the same transport observatory data. Swapping engines without reducing vehicle trips on the road will still leave Rawalpindi and Islamabad breathing a meaningful share of the particulate matter they breathe today.
This is why the existing Metrobus system deserves more attention than it gets. The Rawalpindi-Islamabad Metrobus already carries about 135,000 passengers a day, and 160 of its buses are now electric, imported from China. That is more people moved through zero-emission transit every day than the national target of 2.2 million electric vehicles is expected to put on the road by 2030, across the whole country. Expanding electric bus corridors in the capital region is a known, running system with spare capacity to scale. Subsidising private EV purchases one buyer at a time, in a city where most commuters do not own a car, reaches far fewer people per rupee spent.
None of this requires new research or a new policy document. Pakistan has the PAQI data identifying transport as the dominant source of Islamabad’s smog. It has a National Clean Air Policy and an NEV Policy with specific, funded targets already on paper. What it has not done is match enforcement staffing to the violation rate its own surveys report, phase down fuel subsidies that work against its own emissions targets, or fund the one transit system already moving commuters out of private vehicles at scale. Those are budget and staffing decisions, not mysteries.
Moattar Samim is an environmental researcher.
Ebadat Ur Rehman Babar is a doctoral researcher in Land Resources and a research associate at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI). He can be reached at: ebadaturrehman@sdpi.org
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