Alex Wang's Blog: Greening China

Post-Olympics Environmental Legacy

2008-09-02T15:22:56Z

My first post to this blog a little over a year ago was about whether Beijing would clear the air for the Olympics. The media frenzy over this topic began in earnest back then in August 2007 at the one year pre-anniversary to the Beijing Olympics. My position then (and now) was that the focus on the two weeks of the Olympics was misplaced. Even as the air turned thick on certain days, we felt pretty confident that dramatic one-time measures like massive factory stoppages and pulling a million or two cars off the roads would clear the air. This sort of thing (albeit never at this scale) had worked in the past in China.

The real question deserving of serious focus, we argued, was whether China would do what it takes to sustain its clean air long after the Olympics were done and gone. And now that the Olympics have finally come and gone, the moment of truth has arrived. China can squeeze out the last drops of environmental benefit from its temporary Olympic measures and return to its pre-Olympic ways, or China can take advantage of the good will and raised public expectations generated by its Olympic environmental achievement and make this the point in history when China really turns the corner on the environment.

On the first few days (opening ceremony included), it looked as though the measures were not working. The air was hazy and press conferences were held to state that what people were seeing was not necessarily pollution and possibly ‘fog.’ The New York Times ran some fantastic interactive features on air quality and the Olympics. This feature shows how much regional air pollution impacts Beijing and has an audio bit from an NYU medical professor on the impact of pollutants on athletic performance. Andy Revkin from the dot earth blog had an interesting piece comparing China sulfur dioxide pollution with the SE United States and Europe.

But in the end, the air cleared and we had some incredible, crisp days. Richard Spencer at the Telegraph set out a good summary of how things went in yesterday’s paper:

[T]he air cleared quickly as the effects of a massive shut-down of industry and "alternate day" restrictions on private car usage began to be seen.
About 150 factories in the city had production shut down, while others closed as a result of tighter security during the Games. The ban on cars on alternate days, depending on whether they had odd or even licence plates, reduced the number of cars on the roads by about a million a day.
On several days, the sky really was blue, and on Monday the mountains that surround the city to the north and west were visible from the city centre, an unusual event for the usually humid, overcast summer months.
Figures from the city's bureau for environmental protection showed there were 14 days in which air pollution met its "level one" criteria - matching the level the World Heath Organisation declares safe when achieved over the long term.
The rest of the month was level two, which meets China's own standard for a so-called "blue sky day", except for one day which failed.
Average pollution was down 45 per cent, bringing it down to levels not seen since ten years ago, the ministry said in a statement on its website.
"Temporary measures to reduce pollution that were put in place in Beijing and surrounding provinces to guarantee clean air for the Olympics played a fundamental role in improving the air during the Olympic period," the bureau said.

This is a great bit from NYTimes.com on how air quality along the Beijing marathon route changed in just a month. The route saw a 40% decrease in carbon monoxide from Olympic car restrictions, enough to make conditions (for CO anyway) comparable to those along the NYC Marathon route.

These Beijing skies were the cleanest Beijing had seen in ten years (according to China’s environmental ministry) and if you were here (and knew what things were like in days and years past) you would have seen the way this visibly lifted spirits. Beijing, a city that Beijingers commonly say is ‘a good place for work, but not suitable for people to live in,’ was on these days downright livable. Now, it seems, expectations are way up. People here in Beijing like what they’ve seen and want it to stay that way. In one survey (see also here), “56 percent of the more than 10,000 people surveyed online said they were in favor of continuing the restrictions” on cars instituted during the Olympics. In another survey (click here for a rough Google Translate version of this Chinese article), nearly 70% said they wanted the restrictions to continue.

The pledges to sustain all of this are already coming from a number of quarters. Deputy chief Tan Zhimin of the Beijing City Building Headquarter Office for 2008 said in a Xinhua news piece that: “ It is impossible and will not be allowed should the city go backward in livability because citizen expectations are already driven up by the Olympics and the demand for further social and economic development." Wen Jiabao has also vowed to keep Beijing clean after the Olympics.

So it may be that cleaner days are here to stay in Beijing. The potential is there to leave a real environmental legacy. Like the government leaders, environmentalists and the public at large in the U.S. and Japan of the early 1970s, today’s leaders in China could, if they are willing, put their names down in the history books as the ones who turned around the environment, not just in Beijing, but in all of China.

We at NRDC have been working with forward thinking government officials and environmental experts and NGOs in China for over twelve years to develop the critical solutions to China’s environmental problems. And the solutions are known. They include energy efficiency, transforming fundamental misalignments of incentives in the environmental governance system, greater public involvement, harnessing the power of markets to drive quicker environmental improvement, green buildings and 'smart growth,' and a host of other concrete, realizeable solutions. Now what is needed is the will and the vision to make these solutions a reality.

China ended up doing a good job with air pollution control during the Beijing Olympics, but its performance for the long-term isn’t up to the gold standard yet. And China knows better than anyone else that you don’t make history unless you get the gold.

What a difference a day makes...

2007-11-26T17:33:08Z

It's a beautiful day in Beijing today, which made me think about this picture someone sent me a few months ago:

This is a photo of Beijing on two consecutive days about a year ago in 2006. This, in a single picture, crystallizes for me why we are working in China. The enormity of the problem on one side. The overwhelming promise and potential on the other.

Many days over this gritty city are like those days you see on the left. Those are days when you stay inside and turn your air purifier up to 11. But, sometimes – particularly when a strong wind blows through or after a heavy rain – we get a perfect day like you see towards the right, an instant reminder of what is possible.

There is a tremendous amount of environmental protection activity to take us to the cleaner side of this picture, coming from many different sectors of Chinese society – government, community groups, lawyers, environmental groups, scientists, doctors, etc. More needs to be done though. We have been working to help implement a number of key solutions (in the areas of greater public involvement in environmental protection, improved access to environmental information, energy efficiency and green buildings, clean energy technologies, and so on). I’ll look forward to talking more about these in the weeks to come.

Pollution Reduces China’s Rainfall

2007-11-18T18:01:13Z

Pollution is causing rainfall to decrease in certain parts of China. A little noticed study published in Science earlier this year, somewhat opaquely entitled “Inverse Relations between Amounts of Air Pollution and Orographic Precipitation,” found that average precipitation in a particular mountain region in central China had fallen by 20 percent over the past 50 years. The authors of the study showed that increasing concentrations of fine, airborne pollutants were responsible for decreasing average precipitation in mountain regions.

“These findings highlight the threat to vital water resources in polluted regions of the world where hilly-area precipitation makes a significant contribution to the regional water supply, as in the southwestern U.S. central and northern China, and the Middle East.”

Figure: Trends of annual precipitation amounts and Ro between Mt. Hua and the plain stations of (A) Xi'an and (B) Huayin.

In past years, the conventional wisdom was that environmental protection, while desirable, was a luxury that a still developing China could not always afford. This study is part of the increasingly overwhelming body of evidence that environmental pollution actually hurts China’s economic development. Development that harms a region’s ability to renew its own water supply is not sustainable development. Many terrific experts within China have been pounding this drum in recent years.

The BBC ran an article on this a few months ago.

Little Stiletto Heels and China’s Environment

2007-11-06T13:56:54Z

It’s no secret that the products that fuel our daily consumer lives in the U.S. are now overwhelmingly produced in China. Try living a year without buying anything “Made in China” and see how you like it (one woman seems to have done just that and wrote a book about it – in short, it’s doable, but more expensive and an all-around pain).

Less often discussed is the fact that the environmental crisis in China is driven in significant part by the production of goods for our consumption. The resultant pollution in turn is finding its way back to the U.S. A few media articles have made this connection.

A Wall Street Journal article last week noted the following:

A significant portion of China's air pollution can be traced directly to the production of goods that are exported. In the city of Shenzhen, a major industrial base in southern China, about 89% of emissions of sulfur dioxide, an air pollutant that causes acid rain, are released in the process of export manufacturing, according to a recent study published in the U.S.-based Journal of Environmental Science and Technology. The study also found 71% of particulate matter, the small particles that cause smog and respiratory problems, can be traced to the manufacturing of exported goods.

The best piece I have seen on the connection between Chinese pollution and U.S. consumer behavior is Evan Osnos’ award-winning piece in the Chicago Tribune on Chinese cashmere. The article tied insatiable demand in the U.S. for $20 Wal-Mart cashmere sweaters to massive land degradation in northern China where the goats that generate cashmere wool are raised. The dust storms caused by this land degradation have in turn contributed to air pollution over the U.S. Osnos talks about the cycle on the Colbert Report of all places (to paraphrase, “the goats hooves are like little stiletto heels piercing the earth…”). What goes around comes around.

China’s government is using this dynamic to try to address its own environmental problems. China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) recently announced an initiative with the Ministry of Commerce to clamp down on export manufacturers that violate environmental laws. According to WSJ, “export manufacturers that violate China's pollution laws would be forced to close for one to three years. The policy will be enforced jointly by SEPA and the Ministry of Commerce.”

On its face, this seems like a superfluous move since all enterprises (not just export manufacturers) are subject to environmental laws already. However, the key here is joint SEPA enforcement with the much more powerful Ministry of Commerce. SEPA continues to be one of China’s weakest ministries with only 250 some staffers at the national level to oversee China’s environmental protection, and this represents another in a series of moves by SEPA to maximize its influence within the limits of its fairly significant resource constraints.

Can Beijing Clear the Air in Time for the Olympics?

2007-08-10T10:23:34Z

The hot topic in Beijing this week is whether the murky haze of smog that usually covers the city will be lifted when the world's athletes begin to descend on Beijing in August 2008. This summer certainly hasn't been pretty from an air quality perspective here in Beijing.

Dramatic things are possible though and we may be surprised at what we see come August 2008. One of the key measures Beijing is taking to clean the air is to remove a dramatic number of cars from the roads. There is going to be a trial run of this from August 17-20, when some 1.3 million of Beijing's 3 million motor vehicles will be taken off the road. A smaller scale practice run last fall (a mere 800,000 cars!) during a China-Africa forum showed drastic and virtually immediate reductions in NOx levels of 40 percent. There are some amazing satellite photos and stats on the NASA Observatory site:

Like many things in China, the scale of this endeavor is simply mind-boggling.

Other techniques to clear the air include shutting down factories, holding up the massive amounts of construction going on, and unleashing China's substantial artificial rain-making apparatus in the days before the Games. I've heard that the main concern is forcing clouds to rain themselves out before they hit Beijing so as to avoid a rainy opening ceremony; however, rain almost always whips up winds that blow pollution out of the city for the following day or two. If it helps to remove pollution, I can't imagine that Beijing will not use it in the lead-up to the big show.

So, I'm not too worried about the air during the Beijing Olympics. The real challenge is for China to sustain this long after the Olympics are done and gone. There are a lot of steps that China can take to make this a reality (while continuing to grow and improve economic conditions for the nation's people), but the devil will be in the details of implementation and making sure that leaders have the will to do what it takes. More on this later...