Beijing’s smog obscures rise in cleaner city air
Print Edition
AIR quality in Beijing has improved over the past two years, a senior environment official said yesterday, despite a dramatic three-week episode of hazardous smog that drew worldwide attention last year.
The thick smog that shrouded the city for 22 days in November and December had led to a distorted picture of the capital’s environment record since 2014, city official Yu Jianhua told reporters.
“Many people feel things got worse, because the impression of the pollution in December remains very deep,” said Yu, referring to the episode that sparked Beijing’s first pollution red alerts.
The impression would have been different if the same number of heavy smog days had been scattered over several months, Yu, a director at the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, told a news briefing.
Concentrations of sulfur dioxide, a gas that can cause breathing difficulties, fell 49 percent in Beijing from 2013 to 2015, while the concentration of PM2.5 particles, a dangerous airborne component of smog, fell 10 percent, Yu added.
Yu was speaking at a briefing on efforts to integrate Beijing with neighboring Hebei Province and the port city of Tianjin, a priority set by President Xi Jinping in 2014 to ease regional economic and environmental pressures and cut congestion in the capital.
The efforts include a five-year plan for integrated development until 2020 that envisages a 1,000-kilometer rail network, among other projects, as well as unified regional pollution standards.
Wang Haichen, an official with Beijing’s planning commission, said it aimed to shift manufacturing industries, research bodies and other organizations that had no critical reason to be in the capital to outlying cities.
Environmental concerns had prompted the authorities to force a total of 718 firms to move out of Beijing in 2015, he added.
Hebei, which produces around a quarter of China’s steel, had seven of the country’s 10 smoggiest cities last year, despite efforts to clean up industries and cut coal consumption.
The reluctance of China’s provincial governments to pool resources with each other has fed industrial overcapacity and created huge income disparities. Unable to lure investment in high-tech businesses, Hebei had long relied on low-end steel production to keep its economy afloat, worsening pollution and leaving it painfully exposed to China’s industrial slowdown.
On Thursday, Environment Minister Chen Jining told reporters that weather conditions had worsened the smog last year, but authorities still needed to respond better to emergencies.
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