Smog to spoil celebrations in the north
Print Edition
A SMOGGY Lunar New Year is expected in Beijing and China’s northern industrial heartland just two weeks after it was blanketed in toxic smog which caused traffic chaos, flight disruptions and port closures.
Worsening pollution will engulf four northern provinces, including Hebei which surrounds Beijing, in the run up to the Lunar New Year, from Monday to Thursday, according to the National Environment Monitoring Center.
After a slight respite on Friday, the air quality is predicted to deteriorate again on Saturday, the day of the Lunar New Year, with middle to high level air pollution and patches of severe smog across the region.
Hundreds of millions of people will criss-cross China to visit family and friends during the Lunar New Year holiday, the most important festival for the Chinese, with the government predicting nearly 3 billion trips.
Efforts to clean up the skies in the industrial heartland are being thwarted by coal-burning industry and indoor heating, which increases during winter months.
Reduced industry and traffic during the festive period should help keep the pollution levels down, but fireworks could push levels higher by one or two grades in certain localities, the center said.
To combat an explosion of smog from fireworks, authorities in Beijing have limited sales to a handful of licensed sellers.
Meanwhile, Hebei’s Baoding City is threatening to detain anyone who sets off fireworks outside the four days of celebration.
Air quality in north China remains “especially severe” and worse than the national average, with only 60 percent of all days being considered good quality in 2016 compared to a national level of 78.8 percent, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said at a work report press conference last Friday.
Premier Li Keqiang has pledged to wage war on air pollution, and a goal of over 80 percent of good air days in major cities by 2020 has been written into China’s latest 5-year plan.
Good air days in China are when concentrations of PM2.5, the hazardous fine particulate matter, are below 75 micrograms per cubic meter.
The World Health Organization recommends an annual mean exposure to PM2.5 no greater than 10 micrograms per cubic meter.
Nine out of the top 10 smoggiest Chinese cites for 2016 were in northern China, and six of these were in Hebei, while the best performing cities listed were all along the southern coast, including Shenzhen, Xiamen and Zhuhai, the ministry said.
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