Two years after Lahore’s Air Quality Index reached 1099 and the city briefly ranked as the most polluted in the world, I was invited by the Communication Head of the Environment Protection and Climate Change Department (EPCCD) and his team to visit the department a couple of weeks ago, along with my university colleagues and a group of students, to see what had been done to improve the situation. The building itself revealed nothing. What revealed everything was the room on the second floor. It is called the Climate Watch Hub, and the name is no exaggeration.

More than 8,500 CCTV cameras are monitoring industries, incinerators, car wash stations and dust-prone areas across the province, with all live feeds returning to the Punjab Information Technology Board in real time, covering an entire wall. A young analyst showed me a heat map of Lahore, glowing red in three locations simultaneously. “These are brick kilns, steel mills and fugitive dust from a construction site,” he said, appreciating his team’s coordination. “Just 10 minutes ago, none of us knew anything about them. The AI detected the smoke density and a Smart Enforcement Unit is already en route.”

I saw a little green marker, which I realised was a motorbike, moving towards the third red marker on the map. “That was the whole idea of the past two years,” someone said. “Don’t guess where the pollution is coming from; now it is possible to watch it.” I was shown a photograph of an official vehicle from a few years ago: a single dented white saloon parked outside the department’s gate. Another photograph showed a convoy of EPF motorcycles and green-and-white cars, dozens of them lined up along a service road. The force has expanded from 220 to 660 personnel and has been specifically deployed across the 10 districts identified as pollution hotspots.

There are now 59 air quality monitoring stations across Punjab. These stations measure PM2.5, PM10, carbon monoxide, sulphur........

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