llah Dino Jourio, a 60-year-old schoolteacher who once lived in Warvai, a village in Tharparkar district, is an asthma patient. He recently told a group of researchers that he had had to leave his family to move to a nearby town, Islamkot, because the high pollution level in Warvai kept him permanently sick.

His village is located next to a cluster of coal mines and coal-based power plants, which, he says, emit ash and other toxins in the air and water. After coal was discovered in Tharparkar, he told the researchers, “The landscape of my village changed; all colours of life turned into grey and black.“ He says living close to the mining area was “putting our lives in jeopardy.“

Every morning, he says, “Warvai is covered in a dusty, putrid haze. The grey ash lingers over houses, courtyards and trees.“ He is particularly concerned about the large stockpile of coal lying next to his village. “Strong winds carry ash from this pile into the village, plaguing everyone who happens to be outdoors,” he says. “Locals cannot even stay indoors with open windows and doors.“

Haji Sanaullah Rahimoo, an older man living in another village in Tharparkar has similar complaints. “We are losing our way of life” because of the activities of the companies involved in coal mining and coal-based power generation near the village. These activities, he says, “are spreading poison through the air.“ If these activities continue for a few more years, he adds, “we will be half dead because the ash [emitted by coal mines and coal-based power plants] will start flowing with our blood within our bodies.“

The two stories are included in a report, Health Hazards: A Study on the Environmental Impacts of Coal Mining and Coal-based Power Generation in Tharparkar. Prepared by the Policy Research Institute for Equitable Development, an Islamabad-based think tank, it reveals that respiratory ailments such as shortness of breath, asthma and cough have a higher incidence in Jeendu Dars — located just three kilometres from coal mines and five kilometres from a power plant — than in other villages located further away. Residents of Jeendu Dars have told the authors of the report that every household in their village now keeps cough syrup. They say this had never been the case before the advent of coal mining.

Research by the World Health Organisation endorses the findings of the PRIED report. It says that 3.6 billion people across the world are living in areas that, like Tharparkar, are susceptible to negative impacts of activities such as mining and use of fossil fuels, including coal. The WHO also says that the climatic effects of these activities are expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths yearly. The diseases that will cause these deaths, according to the WHO, include water-borne ailments, respiratory problems, heat strokes, malaria and diarrhoea.

Research published in the journal Nature in August 2022 found that 58 percent of all infectious diseases confronting human beings have been at some point aggravated by climatic hazards that are risking millions of lives.

The floods swept away whole villages, depriving people of their lands, homes and sources of livelihood, says Dr Riaz. “Some women did not even have extra clothes after giving birth in our hospital. They would go back to their shelters in blood-soaked clothes carrying their newborns,” she adds.  

Doctors working in areas suffering from the negative impacts of climate change have a similar point of view. Dr Saadia Riaz, who works as a women’s health officer at a tehsil hospital in Taunsa district – an area hit by the 2022 floods caused by excessive rains – says the medical impacts of the previous year’s deluge were “like a nightmare.“ She says girls as young as 2-3 years of age were suffering from urinary tract infections; pregnant women were delivering premature babies; and people of all ages were dying from malaria and gastrointestinal diseases without being properly diagnosed or treated.

Those floods swept away whole villages, depriving people of their lands, homes and sources of livelihood, says Dr Riaz. “Some women did not even have extra clothes. After giving birth in our hospital, they went back to their shelters in blood-soaked clothes carrying their newborns,” she adds.

Other doctors working in government hospitals in and around Taunsa say that even now, almost every other person there is suffering from one or more water-borne diseases, malaria, typhoid or anaemia. They say that their hospitals do not even have the basic facilities to do tests to diagnose these diseases.

The situation in urban areas is hardly different. The medical condition of Nashra Balagamwala, a young woman, 28, residing in Lahore’s cantonment area, is illustrative.

She woke up around 2am, coughing incessantly and struggling to breathe. “I have asthma. Every November, I am rushed to a hospital at night as it becomes impossible for me to breathe,” she says.

The reason behind the deterioration of her condition is smog – a combination of fog, dust and smoke emitted by factories and transport vehicles – that engulfs Lahore between late October and early February. Air pollution in Lahore has become such that the city has been ranked as the most polluted in the world several times during the last few weeks.

“Smog has become the fifth season in Lahore now,” says Dr Zouina Ashraf, a researcher working on public health in the city. It is because of this season that “women who have never smoked a cigarette are being admitted to hospitals with diseases commonly associated with smoking.“

Comparisons between smoking and air pollution are throwing up harrowing results. A report published in August 2023 by the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute says smoking and other uses of tobacco reduce human lifespan by 2.2 years on average, but breathing in polluted air could reduce life expectancy by 2.3 years.

Dua Sameer, a researcher working at an independent think tank, Karachi Urban Lab, points out that we are not giving due consideration to the changes taking place in our environment. “People living in such climatic conditions cannot escape health effects,” she says.

The writer is a freelance journalist from Lahore working primarily on climate and energy