China still facing an uphill struggle in fight against pollution, warns environment minister
- Li Ganjie says that while the situation is improving, the hardest part of the challenge still has to be tackled
- Cleaning the country’s notoriously dirty air is a major priority for government, but minister warns task remains ‘very challenging’
China’s environment minister said on Monday that while the country’s air quality has improved, the situation is still “grim” and the hardest challenges still need to be tackled.
Speaking at a press conference organised by the National People’s Congress on Monday, Li Ganjie, the Minister of Ecology and Environment, said the number of good weather days in 338 major cities rose to 79.3 per cent in 2018, up 1.3 percentage points from a year ago.
In the same period, the average concentration of PM2.5 – the deadly particles that are most harmful to human health – had fallen by 9.3 per cent, Li said.
But despite this improvement, Li said there should be no let-up in the battle against pollution and the country still needed to do more to tackle the problem.
He said the country had done the easy bit, but the “remaining parts are very challenging. The situation is grim and there is a long way to go”.
China has long been notorious for its heavy smogs, a consequence of years of breakneck economic development and its reliance on fossil fuels.
The Chinese leadership has made cleaning up the environment one of its three most important missions, along with poverty eradication and controlling financial risk, and delivering on these critical tasks is considered a sacred mission for the Communist Party.
Last July, the government outlined a three-year action plan targeting air pollution in three major regions, namely the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area, the Yangtze River Delta and the North China plain straddling Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces.
Li said China has commissioned a high-level study involving more than 2,000 of China’s top scientists and spent over 600 million yuan (US$89 million) to find out the causes of poor air quality in the country and put forward suggestions to clean up the air.
“We have achieved some basic success after about 18 months of hard work and we will make public the results of our research and actions as we go from one stage to another,” Li said.
The minister also said that officials falsifying data was another key obstacle to cleaning up the country’s skies.
He cited the April 2017 example of a collective fraud in Linyi, Shanxi province, where 16 officials in the city’s Environmental Protection Bureau were caught manipulating air quality figures in an attempt to hide excessive air pollution from the public.
Investigations later showed the gang had tampered with six air monitoring stations over the course of a year to cause them to give incorrect readings.
Li said all 16 had been sentenced for their crimes last May, adding: “I don’t think any one of us would have imagined that 16 officials could have been sentenced for environmental crimes in the past but we did exactly this for this serious case in Linyi.”
He claimed that China has now turned a corner and its current air quality figures can stand the test of time.
“What we hated most was such falsification of data,” Li said. “I would not dare to say this in the past but now I can vow that our data is truthful, accurate and complete.”
