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Lahore, Pakistan's second-largest city, is one of the world's most polluted cities, according to crowd-sourced data

Lahore, Pakistan's second-largest city, is one of the world's most polluted cities, according to crowd-sourced data.

On a December day in Lahore, Pakistan's second-biggest city, the smog concealed tall buildings. Men on motorbikes seemed to push through it as they rode. It reeked of diesel and charcoal, compelling the Nadim family to go to the hospital.

"I can't breathe," said Mohammad Nadim, 34. He gestured to his wife, Sonia. "My wife can't breathe." She held their 3-month-old daughter Aisha, who pushed out wet, heavy coughs. "But we are here for our children."

Air pollution is a major public health problem across Pakistan, where an estimated 128,000 people die annually from air pollution-related illnesses, according to the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution.

But researchers say the government has downplayed the severity of the problem for years, produced unreliable data and sought to pass blame to neighboring India. Indeed, the environmental protection department of Punjab, the province surrounding Lahore, has not updated its air quality level for several weeks on its website, reporting it at 166 – a level of airborne fine particulate matter that the U.S. EPA considers to be "unhealthy" but which the Pakistani government says is "satisfactory."

Parents drop off children at a private school in Lahore. A group made up of volunteer mothers known as "Scary Moms" is lobbying parents and schools to reinstate buses to reduce emissions from cars driven by parents to drop off their kids. 

Parents drop off children at a private school in Lahore. A group made up of volunteer mothers known as "Scary Moms" is lobbying parents and schools to reinstate buses to reduce emissions from cars driven by parents to drop off their kids.

Diaa Hadid/NPR

In response, a growing wave of clean-air activists — including a group called the "Scary Moms," environmental lawyers, tech entrepreneurs and even foreign embassies — is using new sources of pollution data to pressure the government to take action. And it might be working — the government is set to roll out a new series of policies aimed at improving air quality.

The movement began with a Pakistani engineer, Abid Omar, who in 2017 began crowd-sourcing data from citizen-owned air quality monitors and uploading the information on Twitter. Omar, who used to live in Beijing, said he was inspired by seeing how citizen activism helped pressure the Chinese government to tackle air pollution.

"We are utilizing data coming out of this network to spread the message about how severe the air pollution is, which we did not know until we had these monitors," Omar says. "Just a very simple act has this huge impact."

Omar's initiative was followed by the U.S. State Department, which erected monitors in the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad and at its consulates — for U.S. citizens living in Pakistan to have access to data about air pollution. Those figures are also regularly tweeted out. They generally correlate with the citizen-sourced data.