Growing pollution in Pakistan’s Punjab province has sickened 1.8M people in a month, officials say

Sure!

The current version of the site gives a sense of doom/defeatism to the viewer, because ultimately it's just telling the user that their lungs are damaged and their lifespan is reduced.

Who exactly is the intended audience of this website?

• People who experience terrible, obviously harmful pollution on a regular basis?
• People who don't experience such pollution on a regular basis or at all?
• People who, despite experiencing terrible pollution, don't believe that pollution hurts their lungs?
• People who believe that air pollution hurts their lungs, but don't understand how?
• People who want to stop pollution, but don't know how?
• People who don't want to stop pollution, or don't care?
• People with enough money to donate to charities and political campaigns?
• People personally causing air pollution, like farmers burning crops?
• etc

Your audience could be one or more of these categories. If you're targeting an audience that already acknowledges the problem, you can focus more on actionable solutions. If you're targeting an audience that doesn't yet understand the problem, you have to focus more on education first. It's totally possible to do both, but it might require multiple pages on your website.

It's valuable to shock people sometimes, but only if you mix in an inspiring message:

• More likely to inspire defeatism: "Your Organs are Damaged / Every breath adds permanent damage. Your lungs can never fully recover from this exposure"
• More likely to inspire action: "Your Organs are Being Damaged / Every breath hurts you more. But there are ways to stop your lungs from getting worse."

You will have to change my wording to something better, but the point is that for the audience I would personally target, almost every negative statement should be paired with a call to action or other inspiring message. You have to lead people to a useful conclusion.

Despite understanding that there is a problem, it's emotionally simpler for people to pretend they can't do anything about it than acknowledge they can do something about but are choosing not to. So you have to remind them that inaction is a choice, and action is a choice. Personally I would also remind them that even small actions can make a big difference. For example, it is a known scientific phenomenon that, say, installing solar panels on your house inspires your neighbors to do the same thing. It's like a cascading waterfall effect.

If your goal is to inspire people to help fix the problem, you have to clearly offer specific actions that get to a solution. Currently, the actions listed on the website are correct but unspecific. People have heard "volunteer with X organization" before, but the might not understand why that's the best action to take. And there are some actions someone could take that aren't mentioned here.

Depending on how political you want to get with this website, there are several categories of actions. Here are some:

Actions directed toward education/awareness:

• Creating public art with an environmental/anti-pollution message, especially art in the real world, but also digital art shared on the internet. This also includes writing fiction books, creating films/TV, and singing songs or making music that's environmental in nature, at least partially. People are very moved by art. I think that targeting at least some of this at young people/children can instill lifelong environmental ideals in them, although you need art targeted toward adults too.
• Engaging with other activists. I see a link to your Telegram group at the bottom. Stuff like that is really valuable to get like-minded people together. Some of the organizations I work with use Discord to coordinate advocacy.
• Establishing new advocacy nonprofits to fill a niche that's missing. For example, a group that focuses on raising awareness in an organized way in a specific municipality. Some of the larger nonprofits miss really low-level stuff like this. Sometimes you need more grassroots organizing to make a difference locally. Establishing a formal or informal advocacy network can help you do all the following suggestions more effectively and in greater numbers.
• Submitting articles to local, regional, and national newspapers explaining what the problem is, and where exactly the pollution comes from. You don't have to work for a newspaper in order to write in one. You'd be surprised how easy it is to get an article in a city's most prominent newspaper, either as a "letter to the editor" or ideally an op-ed. In my opinion, local newspapers are by far the most effective newspapers to target. They are more trusted and perceived to be less political than national newspapers.
• Distributing or mailing physical pamphlets providing information about the problem, similar to newspaper articles but in a different and more portable format. You can hand these out in public, you can mail them to people, etc.
• Organizing public educational sessions with schools, libraries, workplaces, religious institutions, etc. explaining how pollution pertains to them and what they can do about it. In my opinion, getting involved by giving talks at schools is one of the most important things you can do. Young people are the most engaged and most likely to go off and tell literally every person they know what they learned.
• Discreetly posting bills/posters in places people commonly visit so that the causes of and solutions to pollution remain in their minds. This might be considered vandalism, so you would want to put it in... uh, liminal spaces that don't draw too much attention. For example, educational messaging and calls to action posted on the inside of a bathroom stall. People spend a lot of time on public toilets, but no one ever If you can design this poster to fit in with the surrounding environment, people will assume it was put there legally/correctly. If it looks "official," it will remain up. Of course you have to constantly put more posters up because they do get taken down sometimes. And you have to make sure they are physically attached to the surface well. I think subtlety makes a difference here. Just don't do it on private property, and don't advertise a specific nonprofit this way (unless you have their consent).

Actions directed toward the physical source of the pollution (or person literally creating it):

• Personally convincing farmers to use tractors instead of burning stubble. This will make the place they live less polluted. There are also various other benefits to tractors: they reduce all sorts of manual labor and hugely increase productivity/agricultural output. Tractors are expensive, but a good thing to strive for.
• Personally convincing neighbors to cook using electric stoves rather than gas or especially wood. This will make their home and community much less polluted, especially if they get their neighbors to do the same thing. (And more broadly, even if some electricity is generated by coal, some of it is renewable, so an electric stove always produces fewer absolute emissions than a wood or gas stove.)
• Personally convincing neighbors, local business owners, and leaders of community/religious institutions to install solar panels on their homes/businesses. This is becoming much more common in India and Pakistan. Depending on who you're talking to, you can pitch it as a virtuous environmental benefit or as an economic/self-sufficiency benefit to themselves.
• Personally convincing neighbors to purchase cars that run on gas and NOT diesel, which produces way worse exhaust fumes. Even better, try to convince people to buy electric vehicles. I have no clue what the EV charging network is like in India: I'm guessing not great outside the cities, but if people are open to the idea, certainly pursue it.

Actions directed toward the legal mechanisms enabling the pollution:

• Suing polluting organizations for harming health or otherwise violating the law or your right to live or something. IDK very much about India's legal system, but in the US, sometimes these lawsuits are effective. For example, youths suing companies or the government for infringing on their right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (or stuff like that, but in legal-ese). I recommend doing this on the regional AND national level. This is possible but extraordinarily difficult and expensive to do by yourself, so I recommend working with a nonprofit to do it. If you via that organization can be the plaintiff against a big polluting energy company (or whatever), and you have a good argument, a judge may force the company to pay a fine specifically to a fund that addresses air pollution.
• Personally contacting every single elected and non-elected official with literally any possible influence over literally anything conceivably related to pollution, and asking them to do something very specific to address the issue. You have to tell them exactly what to do (they don't know anything). For example:
  • Ask your local mayor or municipal corporation to proactively seek out partnerships with non-profit groups like A-PAG to address the issue of air pollution. You have to suggest specific organizations. It helps to be even more specific: "Please establish an ongoing partnership with A-PAG to provide more tractors to farmers so that they don't burn stubble. Even though this practice is illegal, it will continue to happen and harm your constituents unless the government provides reasonable alternatives to farmers."
  • Individually ask every member of your municipal corporation to allocate ₹ 1 billion+ to create a new public transport line in order to reduce the number of people who have to drive everywhere. Express support for a specific project that has already been proposed, that the city might be able to support.
  • Individually ask every member of your municipal corporation/city council to, say, allocate ₹ 25 million INR to installing electrification infrastructure in homes (to enable more electric stoves) or for vehicles (to enable more electric cars).
  • Individually ask every elected official in your state legislative assembly to introduce legislation to further enforce existing bans on the burning of crop stubble.
  • Individually ask every elected official in your state legislative assembly to introduce legislation for a carbon tax for businesses, including manufacturers.
  • The previous points, but also for your representatives in India's parliament. It's harder to hear back from state/national officials, but your input does have an impact. Their staff read everything and the more people contacting them about something, the more likely they are do assign someone to work on the task, and introduce legislation related to it.
• Personally volunteering with non-profits that lobby the government to do all those things. They will have more resources than you would as an individual, especially for state/parliament officials.
• Providing charitable donations to non-profits that lobby the government to do all those things. These nonprofits are more effective if they have more funding. Even a small donation helps.
• Providing charitable donations to non-profits that endorse political officials and/or fund political campaigns. I don't know what the nonprofit legal structure is in India, but in the US there are basically three kinds of government-recognized nonprofits: 501(c)(3) organizations, which are charitable but not political at all; 501(c)(4) organizations, which are charitable and can endorse political candidates, but can't fund campaigns; and PACs (political action committees), which can fund political campaigns. There might be something similar in India. If people want to make a difference, donating to a 501(c)(4) or especially a PAC in the US goes a long way. And I don't just mean national elections, I mean local and regional elections too. Scare politicians into thinking they'll lose their jobs if they don't proactively and aggressively support clean air regulations. Make sure they know what's at stake!

Actions directed toward the economic incentives encouraging the pollution:

• Created a company dedicated to commercializing new technologies that can minimize future air pollution. For example, battery technology, solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear power, etc. But it can also be on a smaller scale, and it doesn't have to be new: your company can simply focus on finding ways to manufacture existing technology in a more cost-effective way, or finding a use-case for a technology thought to be useless, or combining technologies in ways that create use-cases.
• Privately funding research grants to organizations doing research into technologies that can minimize future air pollution.
• Likewise supporting research into technology that reduces existing air pollution (carbon capture). This is not as effective as reducing the pollution to start with, but it still helps, and it's still necessary.

There are more that I didn't mention. And obviously all of those categories are intertwined with each other, for example the government can fund research into clean air tech.

Your website is in the first category, and therefore it can talk about all the other categories. You can group them however you want.

Of course if you want to talk about this sort of thing you have to find a way to present the data. I am not a website designer so I can't give input about the way you should organize all of that information. But I would keep it direct/to-the-point.

You may decide that your current website isn't the place for all of this. Maybe you want to have completely different sites for different audiences, or just different pages for different audiences. That part is up to you. There is no one single best way to do it, but you have to make sure it's easy for people to understand and they need to be "shown" the right/useful/actionable solutions quite clearly.

Similarly, no one believes these non profits to be the solution as ultimately they run on very little money and have very little impact.

Maybe part of your website needs to make it clear that these nonprofits do have an impact.

Looks to me that groups like A-PAG do plenty of impactful work. Just because the problem still exists doesn't mean they aren't making progress toward it.

They could make more impact if they had more support.

Other thoughts:

• I think the section on "myths"/misconceptions is really useful. You may want to expand that to dispel other false notions. Or not, maybe this is the only one worth talking about.
• When AQI is low, the message displays "You are smoking 1 cigarettes today" or sometimes "0 cigarettes." This is accurate but not compelling. How about you set a condition in the code that, if cigarettes_smoked < 2, you change the metric to "You are smoking cigarettes_smoked * 7 cigarettes this week." I imagine that many places in India will not have an AQI this low, but it's still useful to handle the edge case.
• I agree with another commenter that the ability to specify an arbitrary location to check its AQI would also be nice.
• Perhaps specify a list/glossary of different pollutants and clearly label each of their causes. I see that PM2.5 and NO2 are described, but presumably there are others.
• Personally I would highlight the causes of pollution higher up. It's important to provide that framing so that people understand how to interpret information about pollution. For example, making it clear that "Your lungs are being damaged due to pollution caused by humans. Since it's caused by humans, we can fix it." And you can go into more depth about that later if you like.
• If this is an open-source project, where can people edit the code? GitHub? Can you provide a link?

Nice work again with this website and I hope you continue to advocate for cleaner air in your community. I really cannot emphasize enough that every voice makes a difference, especially when you're using your skills like this. The more people are proactively talking about this issue and trying to solve it, the faster it will be solved.