Post Date
Nov 02 2024

Air Pollution in Lahore

Air pollution caused an estimated 135,000 deaths in Pakistan in 2015 alone. While strategies to avoid the harmful effects of air pollution have taken hold in parts of the developing world, they have yet to take hold in Pakistan. In this research, the citizen’s perceptions towards the provision of air pollution were tested in Lahore. To do so, an interdisciplinary, international research team has designed an SMS-based service that will provide day-ahead forecasts from an industry-leading air pollution monitor to citizens in one neighbourhood of Lahore. This service was used to experimentally measure willingness to pay for air pollution forecasts and citizens ability to forecast air pollution, and tested how these values depend on forecast noisiness. This research could be instrumental in helping policymakers design policies to measure and disseminate information about air pollution and to seek to decrease air pollution.