From Lived Experience to Policy: A Civic Archive for Air Quality Accountability in Punjab, Pakistan
LahorE Smog Collective
Case Study Presentation | 3pm – 3.45pm, BST (Find Local Time)
Duration: 45 Minutes
Platform: MS Teams
Description: Smog is one of the most severe and least accountable public health crises in Punjab, Pakistan — yet the conversation around it tends to resurface for a few weeks each winter and then disappear, rarely reaching the policymakers and researchers positioned to act on it, and rarely centering the people most affected. This session presents the Lahore Smog Collective, a civic archive built by two smog-affected residents to collect and organise first-person testimony of smog’s impact — filterable by location, occupation, and age — and put it directly in front of academics and policymakers. The talk will cover how the archive was built, the design choices behind making lived experience usable as policy-relevant data, and the challenges of sustaining public engagement with an issue that is seasonal in the news cycle but constant in its harm. It will offer a practical model for how small, community-rooted initiatives can create structured, credible inputs into climate and public-health policy discussions, particularly in contexts where formal data collection is limited or slow to reach the communities it should serve.