PAKISTAN – Fourteen-year-old Fatima has woken up coughing, with a fever, on a Monday morning in early November. “My throat hurts, and it feels like the smog is coming in through the rooftop,” she says while rubbing her left eye beneath her thick round glasses.

Outside her window, Lahore – Pakistan’s second-largest city and the cultural heart of Punjab – is wrapped in a thick, grey haze which is suffocating its residents through the winter months. While smog has plagued the city in previous years, this year the air quality has become dangerously poor, reaching levels far beyond what is considered safe for human health. The Air Quality Index (AQI) is a measure of pollution in the air, with higher numbers indicating greater health risks. Levels above 300 are considered dangerous.

“Stuff I could never even imagine, going beyond 2,000 Air Quality Index (AQI). We’re at 2,500 to 2,600,” says Ahmad Rafay Alam, a Pakistani environmental lawyer and activist. “And it’s not only a Lahore-based problem. It’s a Kabul-to-Calcutta problem. A yearlong, regional, public health emergency,” he adds.

“While we tend to think it’s seasonal, it also isn’t, because the things causing air pollution today are the same things causing air pollution in June. It’s just that hot air rises in June, and you have the monsoon, so for most of the year, winds and rain dissipate the air pollution.” (Aljazeera)