Air quality in major cities continuing to get better
Print Edition
AIR quality in China’s largest cities continued to improve during the first six months of the year, the environment ministry said yesterday.
The largest 338 cities enjoyed more clean air days in the first half compared with the same period in 2015, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said on its website. It said 76.7 percent of January-June days had clean air, an increase of four percentage points from a year earlier.
Beijing, Tianjin and 11 cities in Hebei Province, an industrial zone troubled by air pollution, saw cleaner skies, with about 57.4 percent of the period having “good air quality,” 11 percentage points higher than the first half of 2015, said Luo Yi, head of the ministry’s environment monitoring division.
In Beijing, levels of PM2.5 — dangerous tiny pollutants — fell 17.9 percent from a year earlier, the ministry said.
However, concentrations of PM2.5 still averaged 64 micrograms per cubic meter in the first half of the year, significantly higher than the official state standard of 35 micrograms, and the World Health Organization’s guideline of an annual average of no more than 10 micrograms.
The improvement in air quality follows increased measures to crack down on polluters and the use of coal, as well as efforts to tackle overcapacity in the heavily polluting steel sector.
Of the country’s 10 most polluted cities in the first half, six were in Hebei, down from seven at the end of 2015.
The government launched a two-month investigation of the province, one of the country’s most polluted regions, at the end of last year and found that firms had engaged in “fraudulent activities” and were flouting orders not to expand industrial capacity.
On July 8, the ministry said it had fined several state-owned polluters in May for exceeding emission limits. A subsidiary of oil giant PetroChina Co Ltd in Dalian, in northeast China, was fined 2.9 million yuan (US$434,000), it said.
The top 10 cities with the cleanest air were mostly along the southeast coast, apart from Lhasa in Tibet.
The 25 cities along the Yangtze River Delta recorded 72.9 percent of days with good air quality, an year-on-year increase of 3.8 percentage points, while in nine cities along the Pearl River Delta it was 94.7 percent, up 4.1 points.
Luo said the quality of the country’s surface water remained stable. The Yangtze and Pearl rivers fell in the clean category while the Yellow River was slightly polluted. Tianjin’s Haihe River was heavily polluted.
Five of the 106 lakes monitored were at a moderate level of eutrophication and 15 were at a light level, Luo said.
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