Rise in number of cars causes more bad air, environment chief says
The soaring number of private cars has become a key source of air pollution in mainland cities, the country's top environmental watchdog warned. And hundreds of millions of people are living under the constant threat of hazardous smog and ground-level ozone levels, it said.
In a report delivered to the country's top legislature on Earth Day yesterday, environment minister Zhou Shengxian painted a grim picture of the country's air-quality problems, Xinhua reported.
He urged the National People's Congress to bring up to date a bill on the prevention and control of air pollution, which was first adopted in 1987 and last amended in 2000.
He said persistent smog and high concentrations of ground-level ozone have become top pollution threats in most developed regions across the mainland, especially in the Pearl River Delta, the Yangtze River Delta and the region covering Beijing and Tianjin .
Smoggy skies were common in mainland cities; hazy days were more common than blue-sky days in Shanghai, Guangzhou , Tianjin and Shenzhen, Mr Zhou said.
The central government has kicked off an ambitious anti-pollution drive in the past few years, with billions of dollars spent to improve air quality, especially in major cities.
However, deputy environment minister Zhang Lijun admitted yesterday that the effort has been largely hampered by a lack of co-ordination.
'A lot of cities have tried to tackle air pollution problems themselves, but they have yet to achieve marked results,' Mr Zhang said yesterday.
'Air pollution in one city affects another and [the Olympic success in lifting smog in Beijing shows that] we must work together to make a regional effort to deal with it.'
He also blamed the flawed national air-quality standards and the inability to tackle cancer-causing nitrogen oxides for the stalled campaign to cut pollution.
Beijing has yet to include fine particles from the burning of fossil and other types of fuel and ground-level ozone in its much-criticised pollution measurements.
Mr Zhang had promised early this year that the decade-old pollution standards would be changed to include more pollutants.
Ground-level ozone, a gas produced in sunlight by mixed emissions from industry, vehicle exhaust and fuel vapours, is widely believed to be a threat to health.
Mr Zhang conceded that tackling air pollution would be an uphill task, given the rapid increase in private car numbers, which now stood at 64 million vehicles.
A study by the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, under the newly upgraded Ministry of Environmental Protection, said that some 360,000 residents in urban areas in 600 mainland cities died prematurely from breathing polluted air in 2004, which caused damage estimated at more than 152 billion yuan (HK$173 billion).
