Beijing’s air pollution has reached dangerous levels, just days before delegates meet before the national legislature to discuss the pollution.
The concentration of fine particles in Beijing’s air is startling, far higher than the levels suggested by the World Health Organization. At 10:00 AM Thursday morning, the concentrations of PM2.5 reached 469 micrograms per cubic meter. The WHO does not recommend 24-hour exposure to PM2.5 at a level above 25 micrograms per cubic meter. Beijing’s air concentration of the tiny, harmful particles had dropped to 47 by 4:00 PM.
On March 5, the National People’s Congress will meet to address policies affecting the nation. Pollution in China’s cities has become a major issue recently, as particle levels have reached record highs (PM2.5 levels of 993 on Jan. 12).
“I would expect some of the delegates to raise this issue during the NPR meeting,” Ma Jun, founder of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and an environmentalist in Beijing told Bloomberg. “This issue has aroused extensive public concern. Before it was in certain specific cases. Now it’s about the air people breathe and the water they drink, which affect hundreds of millions of people.”
Chinese citizens have begun to voice their concerns on the massive amounts of pollution. The Environment Ministry’s refusal to release soil pollution data to lawyers (claiming it was a state secret) caused newspapers to protest, comparing the refusal to the hiding of the outbreak of SARS in 2003.
A study of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xi-an in 2012 by Greenpeace and Peking University’s School of Public Health estimated that 8,572 premature deaths were caused by exposure to PM2.5. The biggest source of pollution in the country is coal burning, which accounts for 19 percent of the air pollution.
At least the attitude towards this pollution is getting healthier. The Chinese government has begun to disclose real-time PM2.5 levels, releasing data on 74 cities in January. Releasing the data “has forced the local governments to recognize the issue and to give the truth, rather than try to always distort the data,” Ma said. But he also suggested that the government (a large supporter of economic growth over the environment) needs to expose and scrutinize the companies who are causing the pollution: “Now we need to move that to the polluting source side.”
