Beijing to get ventilation ‘corridors’
Print Edition
THE Beijing government is planning to build a network of ventilation “corridors” to ease the city’s pollution problems.
The system will comprise five major corridors — of more than 500 meters wide — and several smaller ones, said Wang Fei, deputy head of Beijing’s urban planning committee.
The corridors will be created by connecting parks, rivers, lakes, highways and low-rise buildings, and construction within the zones will be controlled to ensure there are no obstacles to air flow, he said.
The main routes will include a channel stretching from Taiping Suburban Park in the north of the city, through Olympic Park and the Temple of Heaven, and on to the Beijing-Shanghai Highway in the south.
“Ventilation corridors can improve wind flow through a city, which helps to disperse pollutants and heat,” Wang said.
Similar systems are already in place in other Chinese cities, including Shanghai and Fuzhou, capital of southeast China’s Fujian Province.
Beijing is plagued by air pollution problems, especially in winter, when coal burning increases to provide heating.
In an effort to improve the situation, the government last year closed numerous coal-fired power plants, and shut down or limited output at more than 2,000 polluting factories. Also, in December, it introduced “red alerts” for pollution — when smog engulfed the city — but more work is needed.
According to figures from the Ministry of Environmental Protection, air quality around Beijing improved only marginally last year. The city recorded 186 days on which the air quality was acceptable, which was only 14 more than in 2014.
The average density of PM2.5 — the tiny particles that cause smog — for the whole of 2015 was 80.6 micrograms per cubic meter, or 6 percent lower than a year earlier, the ministry said.
Meanwhile, a senior official from the environmental protection bureau in the capital, said yesterday that from the end of next month authorities in Beijing, Tianjin and four cities in Hebei Province will adopt uniform criteria for issuing pollution alerts.
The warnings will be determined by air quality index (AQI) readings and will be the same for all three regions, said Liu Wei, deputy head of the bureau’s emergency response office.
For instance, a red alert will be issued when the daily average AQI is forecast to be 500 or above for the following 24 hours, 300 or more for the next two days, or 200-plus for the next four days or longer, he said.
The new definitions effectively lower the thresholds for orange and red alerts in cities in Hebei, though raise them in Beijing, Liu said.
The authorities’ respective response measures to alerts will remain unchanged, he said.
Once tested in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, the standardized system will be rolled out to a larger area, he said.
Beijing has issued two red alerts for smog this winter, prompting the closure of schools and bans on outdoor construction, while Tianjin and Hebei both issued their first red alerts in December.
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