On the right track over air pollution
Print Edition
CHINA is headed in the right direction for tackling air pollution though it still has work to do, Minister of Environmental Protection Chen Jining said yesterday.
In the past three years, days of good air quality increased in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, Chen said on the sidelines of the annual parliamentary session in Beijing.
The density of PM2.5 — tiny particles in the air that are hazardous to health and cause smog — in the three regions all dropped by more than 30 percent in 2016 from 2013, he said.
The improvement showed that China was “on the right path” for addressing air pollution. However, the campaign against air pollution could not be completed in two or three years, but would need a relatively long time, Chen said.
As the country entered its fourth year of its “war on pollution,” Chen said there had been faster progress in fighting pollution than in developed countries, but China still needed to do more in getting firms and local authorities to toe the line.
Pollution alerts are common in northern China, especially during bitterly cold winters when energy demand, much of it met by coal, soars.
Since the middle of last December, large parts of northern China have suffered successive bouts of heavy smog that put dozens of cities on “red alert.”
The environment ministry named and shamed dozens of enterprises and local governments for failing to heed emergency restrictions on industrial output and traffic.
Chen said China’s “environmental capacity” was much weaker in winter, adding that measures aimed at resolving winter pollution were now “very clear,” with implementation the key factor.
The minister said that governments at the grassroots level were the “weak link” when it came to implementing environmental laws.
He revealed that 18 inspection teams had already been established to comb the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region for evidence of environmental violations during outbreaks of heavy smog.
The minister said they were focusing on 400 key “hot spots” responsible for about 40 percent of the region’s emissions, and would aim to tackle “scattered” and small-scale polluters, including small coal-fired boilers, in the region.
Chen told reporters environment authorities had meted out 124,000 punishments to businesses for environment-related wrongdoings last year, with fines totaling 6.63 billion yuan (US$959.5 million). The fines marked a 56 percent surge from a year earlier.
China would step up law enforcement to maintain a tough stance on illegal practices, Chen added, promising “zero tolerance” on such offenses.
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