Hundreds of Chinese Cities Don’t Meet Air Standards, Report Finds
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Version 0 of 1. BEIJING — Air pollution data from the Chinese government shows that more than 90 percent of 360 Chinese cities failed to meet national air quality standards in the first three months of this year, according to a report released on Tuesday by Greenpeace East Asia. Interior provinces were found to have the most polluted cities during those months. Cities near the eastern and southern coasts also had dire levels of fine pollutants, but the levels were lower than in the same period one year ago, the report said. The drop could be because of central government policies announced in late 2013 aimed at limiting coal use in China’s most densely populated regions. Researchers at Greenpeace East Asia, which is based in Beijing, ranked 360 cities after looking at levels of fine particulate matter called PM 2.5, considered more dangerous than other forms of pollutants because it can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Air monitors in 367 Chinese cities record the levels of PM 2.5 and other kinds of pollutants hourly, and the data was released with the approval of the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Greenpeace said it discarded data from seven cities for the report because it was flawed. The average concentration of PM 2.5 in the 360 cities was 66 micrograms per cubic meter, nearly twice the national standard of 35 micrograms per cubic meter. The average was more than two and a half times the exposure limit recommended by the World Health Organization. That limit is 25 micrograms per cubic meter over a 24-hour period. Only 32 cities met the national air quality standard, while 141 cities, or nearly 40 percent, had PM 2.5 levels that were more than twice the standard. The most polluted provinces were Henan, Hubei and Hebei. Beijing ranked fourth, and Shandong, on the east coast, was fifth. All of those areas have or are surrounded by heavy industrial factories that rely on burning coal. The three most polluted cities were Baoding, a steel town in Hebei; Kashgar, a traditional Silk Road oasis town in the far western region of Xinjiang; and Xingtai, another industrial town in Hebei. The three cleanest cities, in order, were all in the far west: Linzhi in Tibet, Lijiang in Yunnan Province and Altay in Xinjiang. The data show that China, despite a recent drop in the growth rate of coal use, continues to have among the most polluted cities in the world, alongside urban centers in India and Iran. Communist Party leaders are aware that the environmental degradation is a major source of anxiety and discontent among ordinary Chinese. Li Keqiang, the prime minister, promised in March 2014 to carry out a “war against pollution,” a vow that he reiterated this March. Yet some party officials are reluctant to allow the wider public too much of a say in how that war should be waged, as evidenced by the government ban on a hugely popular online video documentary on air pollution, “Under the Dome,” that was carried on many Chinese websites for one week in early March. Zhang Kai, a researcher at Greenpeace East Asia who helped oversee the report, said in an email interview that there was some positive news. He said Greenpeace believed that policies the central government announced in September 2013 to limit coal use in three major population centers had actually led to notable drops in PM 2.5 levels. Beijing, for example, had a nearly 13 percent drop in PM 2.5 concentration levels from the same three-month period in 2014. The average level in Beijing was 92.4 micrograms per cubic meter — still nearly four times the recommended limit set by the World Health Organization. Mr. Zhang said Hebei over all had a 31 percent improvement in average PM 2.5 concentration, although, as in Beijing, the level was still in a dismal range. The government’s air-monitoring methodology was recently called into question in a report released by the Center for Statistical Science at Peking University. That report said the air monitors and the collection of data by the government failed to take into account wind patterns and other weather phenomena when calculating PM2.5 levels. Windy months might give a false impression that PM2.5 levels have dropped. The report said that average PM 2.5 levels in 2013 and 2014 were worse than in the two previous years if weather patterns were taken into account. |