Every May, as the temperature climbs in the plains below, the headlines arrive in Pakistan with the grim reliability of a recurring illness: soaring temperatures expected in Karachi, heatwave alert issued for Sindh, city braces for extreme heat — and then, days later, the unbearable count of the dead. Karachi, a city of over 23 million people and the financial engine of Pakistan, transforms each summer into something resembling a slow-moving public health catastrophe. The question that should be asked — and never seriously is — is not whether the heatwave will come. The question is why, after decades of data, after the deaths of approximately 1,200 people in the single catastrophic heatwave of June 2015, after countless reports and ministerial declarations, the fundamental causes remain not just unaddressed but, more damning still, unread.

I write this from a remote village in the Murree Hills, where the evening air tonight is cool, and the pine trees stand indifferent to the suffering of the metropolis far below. I have no land in Karachi. I am not employed by any organisation. I have not received a single dollar for writing on climate change in my entire life. I write because Karachi is the City of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and because the silence of the informed is itself a form of complicity.

The Ministry of Climate Change has, over the years, produced what one might charitably call an impressive body of desk literature. Studies, assessments, vulnerability frameworks, early warning system procurement proposals — all launched with ceremony, all documented with graphs, all presented in the climate-controlled comfort of five-star hotel conference rooms. The most persistent recommendation emanating from this body of work has been public education campaigns: the citizen who has no piped water should be better educated about staying hydrated. This ministry and the Ministry of Water Resource that cannot build a water conduit in 24 years, wants to teach Karachi's labourers to drink more water. This is not climate policy. It is a theatre.

A pathological laboratory that refuses to read its own test results is not a laboratory; it is a waiting room. The Ministry of Climate Change has the emissions data. It has the inventory. It has never, in any serious policy document, confronted what those numbers actually say.

And there are numbers. Let us treat them as what they are — a pathological laboratory report — because that is precisely what an emissions inventory is. It is a diagnostic. It tells you what is making the patient sick. When a physician receives such a report, they do not theorise about meteorological factors or blame the humidity or commission another study on atmospheric stagnation. They read the report and act on what it says. The Ministry of Climate Change has received this report. The question is whether anyone in authority has ever genuinely read it.

Pakistan's emissions inventory for Karachi is unambiguous in its diagnosis. Total combined emissions across all sectors — PM2.5, SO2, NOx, and CO — amount to 394.82 units. Of that total, a single sector accounts for 298.04 units. That sector is transportation. Its share of Karachi's total pollution load is 75.5 %. Not a plurality. Not a dominant contributor. Three-quarters of the entire city's combined emissions output comes from its transport sector. This is not a statistic buried in a footnote. It is the central finding of the city's own data, and it has the force of a clinical diagnosis.

The pollutant-specific breakdown is, if anything, more alarming still. Consider what the numbers reveal at the level of individual pollutants:

Carbon monoxide, at 90.4 % transport-sourced, is almost entirely a product of Karachi's vehicle fleet. Nitrogen oxides NOx stand at 80.5 % from transport. These two pollutants are not merely unpleasant. They are the chemical precursors to ground-level ozone, the principal component of urban smog and a direct driver of respiratory disease, cardiovascular deterioration, and heat-related mortality. When NOx and CO interact with volatile organic........

© The Friday Times