Breaking Cassandra’s curse on air pollution

Let us start with the Greek myth of Cassandra, a princess of Troy, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba. The god Apollo fell in love with her and granted her the gift of prophecy to win her favour. However, when Cassandra rejected him, Apollo could not take back the gift he had given. Instead, he placed a curse on her: no one would ever believe her prophecies. This doomed her to a life of foresight and frustration. Cassandra foresaw the Trojan horse as a trick and predicted the city's ruin, yet her people dismissed her as a madwoman. Hence the term "Cassandra's Curse"—the agony of being able to see the future clearly but being completely unable to convince anyone to believe you or act on your warnings.

Just as Cassandra's visions could not save Troy from destruction, the overwhelming evidence of air pollution will mean little if Bangladesh continues to ignore the crisis. With undeniable data and visible human suffering, failing to formally recognise air pollution as a national disaster would be a blindness history will not forgive.

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Breathing in the apocalypse

In this country, we picture disasters in the forms of cyclones, floods, or fires. What truly qualifies as a disaster? According to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), a disaster is "a severe breakdown in a community or society's normal functioning caused by hazards interacting with vulnerability and exposure, leading to human, material, economic, or environmental damage." Bangladesh's own Disaster Management Act, 2012 defines a disaster as "any natural, human-made, or climate-induced event that severely harms lives, livelihoods, resources, and the environment, exceeding a community's capacity to cope without external assistance".

Today, one of our lethal crises is invisible to our policymakers. It is the air we breathe. According to the recent Lancet Countdown report, Bangladesh recorded an estimated 2.25 lakh deaths related to air pollution in 2022. That is more deaths than any cyclone, flood, or lightning strike caused in the same year. In Dhaka alone, residents breathed "good" air for just 31 days in the last nine years. The other 3,083 days were marked by hazardous, very unhealthy, or unhealthy air. By these standards, air pollution is not just a disaster—it is one of our deadliest disasters.

One might ask if the government has tried to bridge this gap. Is not there already a wide range of legal and policy frameworks to combat air pollution? Bangladesh does indeed have several laws and policies addressing the issue, including the Environment Conservation Act (1995), the Brick Manufacturing and Brick Kiln Establishment (Control) (Amendment) Act (2019), the Air Pollution Control Rules (2022), and the National Air Quality Management Plan (2024-2030). Together, these frameworks provide the legal backbone, sector-specific interventions, as well as standards, monitoring, and enforcement mechanisms for air quality management.

However, under these policies, the responsibility for enforcement does not lie with a single authority. Instead, multiple government bodies, such as the Ministry of Environment (MoE), Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA), the traffic division of Bangladesh Police, and others, share overlapping mandates. This fragmentation, coupled with weak inter-agency coordination, makes holistic and effective enforcement of air quality regulations extremely difficult.

It is reasonable to ask whether the government has introduced any initiative to bridge this coordination gap. To ensure a coordinated approach to air quality management, the Air Pollution Control Rules established a high-powered National Committee to Control Air Pollution, headed by the cabinet minister and senior secretaries of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Co-operatives, BRTA, Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (Rajuk), and city corporations of Dhaka. However, despite this structure, the committee's work has shown little progress. Adding to the challenge, the Bangladesh Clean Air Bill, prepared six years ago, still awaits enactment. If passed, it would constitute the most significant legal instrument for air pollution control; in its absence, efforts to enforce clean air regulations remain weak and fragmented.

Air pollution is not a slow-moving inconvenience. It is a full-blown public health catastrophe. And yet, unlike floods or lightning, air pollution has not been officially recognised as a national disaster.

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Act now to curb air pollution

Why does official recognition matter? Back in 2016, the government declared lightning a disaster due to rising casualties. When lightning was declared a disaster, it transformed our response. The government mobilised funds, launched a life-saving public awareness campaign, installed lightning arresters, widely used radio, television, and mosque loudspeakers to warn people about the dangers of being in open fields or under trees during thunderstorms, and the "30-30 Rule" campaign was integrated into our early warning systems. These measures significantly increased awareness among communities about lightning risks and safety practices. But lightning kills only a fraction compared to toxic air.

If air pollution is declared a disaster under the Disaster Management Act, 2012 there will be several upsides. First, polluters could face legal penalties. Sub-sections 37 and 43 of the act make ignoring directives punishable, while sub-section 51 holds company leaders accountable. Second, the victims could seek compensation, which will evidently increase or, in our case, introduce accountability. This will also make it easier to access dedicated disaster funds that could support medical care, masks, air filters, and preventive campaigns. Finally, a response mechanism could be activated. Disaster management committees across the country could be mobilised to monitor air quality and enforce regulations. Such approaches would shift air pollution from a "soft" environmental concern to a hard legal mandate.

Now we might be asking ourselves: has any other country taken such steps? The answer is nuanced. None has declared air pollution a permanent national disaster, but several have taken half-measures. In South Korea, "severe smog" has been declared a "social disaster," unlocking emergency funding. Chile has declared environmental emergencies over "toxic haze" in Santiago. Indonesia declared national emergency for transboundary haze. China's "Red Alert" system for air pollution in cities like Beijing functions as a de facto local disaster protocol. When a Red Alert is issued, it triggers mandatory school and factory closures. These declarations trigger immediate, mandatory actions, such as temporarily shutting down thousands of factories. Banning unfit vehicles from the roads, prohibiting the use of wood-burning activities.

For us, declaring air pollution a national disaster is not "symbolic" anymore. It is a strategic and immediate necessity. It would ensure that polluted air is treated with the same urgency as floods or cyclones—because it kills silently, relentlessly, and at a larger scale.

Bangladesh has shown global leadership in climate adaptation. The country, facing some of the world's most toxic air, can be a pioneer by being the first to formally recognise this silent killer as a national disaster under our own robust Disaster Management Act.

We must not wait for another generation to choke. Recognising air pollution as a national disaster would honour our constitutional duty to protect public health, enforce accountability on polluters, and provide relief to the millions already suffering. Until that day comes, we are all condemned to wear Cassandra's gown, forced to watch a preventable future with painful clarity, powerless to make those in power believe our warnings.

Muksitul Hoque Srijan is senior research assistant at Hub for Climate Change, Environment and Health (CCEH) in BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health.

Farzana Misha is associate professor at CCEH in BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health.

Views expressed in this article are the authors' own. 

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