Pakistan Develops a National Clean Air Plan Using the Country’s First Air Pollutant Inventory

Pakistan faces some of the worst air pollution in the world. Air pollution shortens Pakistani lives by over 4 years on average, and by seven years in some areas. The country is also currently facing the devastating effects of climate change head on, including flooding in August so dire that one-third of the country was fully submerged, affecting more than 33 million people.

“The Pakistani people are facing the monsoon on steroids, the relentless impact of epic levels of rain and flooding. The climate catastrophe has killed more than 1,000 people with many more injured,” said United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres at the time.

Pakistan is working to mitigate these realities with policy and planning, including a National Clean Air Plan being developed by the Ministry of the Environment with support from the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), and Clean Air Asia. This plan sets targets for air pollution concentration, identifies actions to mitigate air pollution, and outlines a plan for coordinating action on air quality management. 

Development of the plan has also resulted in the country’s first national air pollutant inventory, which includes the first-ever quantification of black carbon and other air pollutants at both the national and the provincial scale.

This plan outlines the need to focus on five sectors at the national scale: 

• converting wood stoves and biomass cooking into cleaner and more fuel-efficient cooking and heating methods; 
• removing the worst-emitting vehicles and implementing Euro fuel standards in the transport sector;
• stopping open burning in the agricultural sector; 
• stopping open burning of waste; 
• and properly regulating industry emissions. 

“Implementing the actions that deliver the biggest benefits for air pollution leads to a reduction in greenhouse gases. Our analysis is specifically focused on reducing particulate matter emissions and other air pollutants. In doing that, we’re also making industry more efficient by switching to more electric vehicles, and by reducing burning in agricultural waste and in the residential sector, you also reduce greenhouse gases and short-lived climate pollutants,” said Chris Malley, Senior Researcher, Stockholm Environment Institute.

Given Pakistan’s political structures, it was necessary to examine these plans on the national level and then also to assess the county’s eight provinces to determine which measures each one needed. So a technical team was established, with both national and regional representatives who were all trained on the Low Emission Analysis Platform-Integrated Benefit Calculator (LEAP IBC).

Importantly, it became clear that in each of the provinces, different sectors often contributed to the problem of air pollution in different ways and on different scales — urban regions struggle with waste management, for example, while more rural areas struggle with the burning of  agricultural waste.

As a result of both of these factors, the National Clean Air Plan delegates its implementation to the provinces. Because of this, the CCAC has funded a two-year follow up project supporting the provinces to develop their own clean air plans.

“The analysis that the CCAC funded in this project shows that those clean air action plans have to be bespoke, because the major sources differ between different provinces and the effectiveness of the measures differ,” said Malley.

This project will use the same strategy of technical assessments developed with the LEAP-IBC tool to develop a plan that reflects the co-benefits each province will get from taking action on air pollution. These co-benefits are a way to build political support for the plan and to save resources in cash-strapped local governments. 

Malley points out that working on a provincial level also means access to local data, since every province in Pakistan has their own statistical authorities who can help tailor assessments to local conditions to get a better assessment and a more robust evidence base.

Pakistan is also a signatory to the Global Methane Pledge, a voluntary commitment to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30 per cent by 2030, which could eliminate over 0.2˚C of warming by 2050. Pakistan’s Clean Air Plan establishes a variety of ways that the country can enhance its methane emissions reductions, including leak detection and repair in the oil and gas sector, better manure management in the agricultural sector, and improved waste management. With additional funding and support, Pakistan has a significant opportunity to reduce methane emissions. 

According to the CCAC’s Global Methane Assessment, human-caused methane emissions can be reduced by up to 45 per cent this decade which would avoid nearly 0.3°C of global warming by 2045. More than half of emissions come from human activities in three sectors: fossil fuels (35 per cent), waste (20 per cent) and agriculture (40 per cent). 

Pakistan is building off of its ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions, which commits the country to a target of reducing projected emissions by 50 per cent by 2030, conditional on international support. To accomplish this, Pakistan plans to move to 60 per cent renewable energy, including converting 30 per cent of its vehicles to electric and banning imported coal. The country has also outlined plans to convert to zig-zag brick kiln technology to mitigate SLCPs: brick kilns are recognized as one of the largest sources of black carbon contributing to 20 per cent of total world-wide emissions along with iron and steel production. They also aim to implement Euro-5 standard fuel.

The plan further committed to a re-evaluation and revision of Pakistan’s Clean Air Program, including by using the LEAP-IBC tool to assess the multiple climate and health benefits of reducing air pollution, the catalyst for the CCAC’s work in the country.  

“Pakistan has done a huge amount to move forward what it said it was going to do in its NDC to integrate air pollution and climate change,” said Chris Malley. “Our goal was to build an assessment and to increase the capacity of the team in Pakistan to be able to understand the air pollution benefits and their climate change plans and how they can alleviate the terrible impacts of air pollution while at the same time achieving their climate goals — and we’ve done that with this team at the Ministry of Climate Change.

“The CCAC and the SEI tries to undertake these projects in a way that leaves capacity within the national institutions who can take on these projects and take on these initiatives after the project end stage. In Pakistan, in terms of the coordination and institutional understanding of the need to integrate climate and clean air I think the CCAC has done a very good job in making sure there is the capacity there and that this initiative will go forward.”