LAHORE – Focused interventions on the basis of reliable data can help controlling the menace of air pollution.
Punjab’s Environment Protection and Climate Change Department (EPCCD) claim that 83 per cent of Lahore’s air pollution is caused by vehicles is not based on reliable data.
The basis of this claim is a report titled “Sectoral Emission Inventory of Lahore” published by the Urban Unit, Planning and Development Board of Punjab.
The report also explains that there were 6.29 million registered vehicles in the Lahore district, 69pc of which are motorcycles and scooters (2021).
The report quotes, “The number of registered vehicles in Lahore has increased at an alarming rate, with a sharp increase in the number of two-stroke vehicles such as motorbikes, scooters, and auto-rickshaws.”
Expressing surprise over the claim of an increase in vehicles with 2-stroke engines, the environmentalists said that the manufacturing of 2-stroke engines has been suspended in Pakistan for decades.
“As per the law of the land, all two-wheelers manufactured in Pakistan since the mid-2000s are 4-stroke Euro 2 compliant having emission levels truly within the prescribed range of PEQS,” he added.
“Some of these two-wheelers plying on roads might be poorly maintained and almost all of them are being run on poor quality and contaminated fuel being supplied in Pakistan leading to higher pollutant emissions but surely, they are not 2 strokes,” said the expert.
Moreover, he raised questions on the authenticity of data about the vehicles on the road. He stressed that the government must make a serious effort to remove anomalies in all its data sets if we are to make a fair judgment of air pollution emissions.
Citing an example in Pakistan Economic Survey 2023-24, he said that the survey showed that 15,223,925 motorcycles were registered till 2016 and the number of motorcycles on the road in the same year was 6,669,300 only.
Just within a year, the number of motorcycles on the road increased by 5,306,000 units to 11,975,300 despite registration of only 2,283,822 units, showing an anomaly of over 3 million units.
Similarly, another major anomaly was witnessed in 2020 with 1,406,588 new registrations but the number of motorcycles on the road surged by 8,185,000 during the same year.
The latest figures for 2024 (till March) show that almost all the motorcycles registered in Pakistan since the country came into being (28.78 million units) are still running on the road, an impossible feat by all means.
“These anomalies put a big question mark over the estimates of emissions from motorcycles, which are calculated by multiplying default emission factors by the number of vehicles,” the expert added.
“The policy-making must be based on empirical research to help the judicious allocation of scarce resources to manage the smog issue effectively,” he said, adding that without scientific fact-based analysis, we may continue to face the same dilemmas year after year.
