Air Quality of Karachi and Lahore: How does the energy industry of Pakistan affect it?

Air Quality Index (AQI) is a significant rating of how the quality of air is at a given time. The AQI of Karachi and Lahore has been worsening in recent times with Lahore being much worse than Karachi. The energy sector of Pakistan on the other hand has been expanding rapidly in the past few decades given the increasing need for essential necessities such as electricity due to an increase in population of the country. This paper will attempt to do a study on this worsening rate of the Air Quality Index and try to find a correlation between the expanding energy sector of Pakistan and the AQI readings. It will also do a comparison between the AQI readings of Lahore and Karachi and try to establish the reason why Lahore's air has seen a higher decrease in quality when compared to Karachi given that both of these cities share similar socioeconomic conditions being the financial hubs of the provinces Punjab and Sindh respectively.