China Tries a New Tactic to Combat Pollution: Transparency
BY CHRISTOPHER BEAM
Beijingers who care to know how much poison they’re inhaling are familiar with the Air Quality Index, which measures smog levels at different locations around the city and applies labels like “good,” “unhealthy,” and “hazardous.” Another handy tool might be called the Wang Anshun Index, after the mayor of Beijing. The week he was elected, in January, 2013, Wang called the city’s smog “worrisome.” In January, 2014, after a week of particularly horrendous pollution, he described Beijing’s environmental crisis as a “life-or-death situation.” Last week, he raised the stakes again, bluntly declaring his own city unlivable. If Wang doesn’t have his own app yet, he should.
The mayor’s most recent dose of real talk followed an announcement that Beijing had failed to meet its 2014 target of a five-per-cent reduction in the average annual concentration of tiny particulate matter, known as PM2.5. Levels did decline, but only by four per cent. The announcement didn’t mention that levels of large particulate matter, PM10, actually increased by 7.1 per cent in the same year. This was after the central government had unveiled a two-hundred-and-seventy-seven-billion-dollar plan to fight pollution, in mid-2013, and afterBeijing itself had allocated a hundred and twenty-one billion dollars, at the beginning of 2014. The news was a reminder that, even as the capital has stepped up its anti-smog efforts, livability may be a long way off.
The conversation about pollution in China has shifted dramatically in recent years. In 2011, state media still blamed “fog” for poor visibility in the capital, and government meteorologists denied that smog was caused by emissions. But denial has become less tenable by the day: air-quality data is now widely available, including a running update from the roof of the U.S. Embassy; “airpocalypse” conditions have become a regular, sometimes crippling feature of Chinese cities; and pollution is driving away tourists. Now officials are keen to stress the importance of environmental protection. Last March, Premier Li Keqiang promised to “declare war” on pollution and fight it with an “iron fist.” Chen Zhu, a former health minister, co-authored a report in 2014 concluding that air pollution kills between three hundred and fifty thousand and five hundred thousand Chinese every year. Wang, not to be outdone, has said that if government officials don’t fix the problem they will find their “heads on a platter.” That hasn’t stopped Beijing from suppressing unflattering pollution data, as the city did during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, in November, but the over-all trend has been toward acknowledgment.
With the new rhetoric has come a policy shift at every level of government. The Communist Party now evaluates local officials not only on their economic performance but also on their environmental record. In 2014, the National People’s Congress updated the country’s environmental-protection law for the first time in twenty-five years, approving stricter punishments for factories that pollute. When President Obama visited Beijing for the APEC summit, he and President Xi Jinping signed a joint agreement in which China promised to curb the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030. It’s an ambitious goal, some climate researchers say—but then ambitious is good.
Beijing has tackled smog aggressively, at least on paper. In 2013, the city announced a five-year plan that would, if implemented properly, cut coal burning by more than half, restrict the number of cars on the road, introduce a pilot cap-and-trade program, and urge factories to disclose their emissions publicly. Of course, each of those measures requires enforcement, and enforcement has never been China’s strength. Many local officials have close ties to factory and power-plant owners. Others simply let companies pollute, since emissions-violation fees are a source of revenue for the government. Polluters, likewise, would often rather pay the fine than reduce output. Last year, in Shanghai, one large coal-fired power plant that had drawn praise for its clean record was found to be violating emissions standards every week for six months, and half of the coal plants in Jiangsu province, just north of Shanghai, routinely exceeded regulatory limits. But Beijing does seem to be backing up its legislation with action. According to Wang, in the past year, the city has shut down three hundred and ninety-two manufacturing firms for polluting and taken four hundred and seventy-six thousand inefficient vehicles off the roads. The city is also insisting on accountability: each of the eighty-one bullet points in its five-year plan includes the name and title of the person who is responsible for making it happen.
These efforts will help, but they will also require broader coördination, because the quality of Beijing’s air is not entirely up to Beijing. The capital is surrounded by Hebei province, a steel-producing region that contains seven of China’s ten most polluted cities. Even if Beijing shut down every factory in the city and removed every car from the road—as it practically did for APEC—it takes only a day of wind from the southwest to wreath the capital in smog. This analysis, by Greenpeace’s Lauri Myllyvirta, shows how wind direction affects Beijing’s pollution levels:
As a result of the permeability between regions, the State Council’s 2013 pollution action plan addresses the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area as a whole, urging those governments to meet new reduction targets together.
Regional coöperation only works, though, if governments can trust one another’s data. During a lecture at the Yale Center Beijing on Tuesday, the environmental campaigner Ma Jun explained how radical disclosure can pressure governments to be honest about enforcement. In 2006, Ma and his organization, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, used publicly available data to create an interactive water-pollution map that highlights polluting firms around the country. They later launched a similar map for air pollution. Now almost all of China’s provincial governments have created platforms to disclose data online about local factory emissions, though data quality and reporting speeds vary. The government of Shandong province has gone so far as to publish a monthly list of violators. “I was really impressed,” Ma says. He credits China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection for taking the lead on transparency. “We need to give them credit for doing that. It’s not easy.”
Ma argues that disclosure is especially important in China, because the country lacks one of the usual mechanisms for enforcing environmental laws: a functioning court system. In January, the Supreme People’s Court announcednew rules that would make it easier for N.G.O.s to sue polluters. But that doesn’t mean that a judge will be fair—assuming he decides to hear a case in the first place. “It’s still not fully based on rule of law,” Ma says. “Polluters are still going to fight to influence the process.” For environmental activists, leveraging public opinion is the next best option. Ironically, he notes, China is better equipped to implement a policy of radical transparency than any other country in the world. For a decade, local government agencies have been directly monitoring emissions from polluters. (In the United States, by contrast, the Environmental Protection Agency relies largely on data that companies self-report.) Real-time disclosure wouldn’t mean creating a new system from scratch so much as making an existing process public.
Transparency alone won’t fix China’s pollution problem, of course; it’s just one tool among many. Nor will Beijing’s air clear up anytime soon. Even if the city were to reach its 2017 target—a twenty-five-per-cent reduction in PM2.5—the resulting average annual concentration of particles would still be about sixty micrograms per cubic meter, which is nearly twice the Chinese national standard and six times the World Health Organization’s guidance level. That would mean more “blue sky” days and fewer “airpocalypses,” but a truly livable Beijing is far off and will require even more ambitious pollution-reduction targets. Whether Wang sees his city recover within his lifetime depends on ongoing aggression, from all levels of government throughout the country, in tackling the problem of air quality—and on their ability to enforce the law.
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