Air quality workshops to fight toxic skies

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Air quality workshops to fight toxic skies

发布时间：2014-09-24  来源：]

The UN Climate Summit comes as more than 340 institutional investors representing 24 trillion U.S. dollars in assets have called on government leaders to set carbon pricing policies that encourage private sector investment. Martina Fuchs reports on some of the efforts to tackle air pollution in Beijing.

"Restoring Blue Skies: Accelerating Air Pollution Control" was the name of a workshop held in Beijing this September.

It was co-organized by the Chicago and Beijing-based Paulson Institute, which calls itself a "think-and-do tank".

"The idea here is to work together around a continual learning and sharing from each other about best practices, latest research. And then the subsequent activities and steps are related to how do you apply the solutions, what are the most effective solutions of the problem? What are the lighthouse projects, examples that can be easily replicated across multiple cities?" Elle Carberry, MD climate change&air quality program Paulson Institute said.

The initiative aims to help cut air pollution in China, build national strategies, reduce the use of fossil fuels and establish a strong enforcement system starting off in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area.

It comes as the air quality problem in China has reached crisis proportions.

"Air pollution has figured high on the government's agenda since a choking smog dubbed "airpocalypse" engulfed major Chinese cities in January 2013. The choking smog led Premier Li Keqiang to announce a "war on pollution" this March.

Authorities have introduced anti-pollution policies and pledged to clean up the air but there’s no end in sight to combatting the smog cloud.

"We want to control the total demand for energy by 2020 as a national policy. We will do much more in renewable energy and natural gas. In this way it’s feasible or possible that coal use could peak in the coming two or three years. Then hopefully by 2020 we can see a mix change if we follow the policy very well," Jiang Kejun, professor at NDRC energy research institute said.

The latest government data showds that air pollution across 74 key Chinese cities worsened in July compared to last year. The cities struggled with pollution on 26.9 percent of the days in July, up from 19.5% a year ago.

Beijing, Tianjin, and seven cities in Hebei province topped the list of the 10 worst air cities.

International experience may also help speed up the progress.

"There are three things that have helped clean the air in the U.S. First, a strong pollution monitoring so we know how polluted the air is. Second is strong enforcement. Polluters need to be brought to court if they violate the law. Third is strong citizen participation. If the citizens get involved, then it expands the ability of the government to get the job done," David Hawkins, director climate programs of natural resources defense council said.

In one of the latest steps to tackle air pollution, the Chinese government announced this September that it will ban the import and local sale of coal with high ash and sulfur content starting from next year.

"Based on our calculations, if we follow the air pollution policy of coal consumption controlling, then the total carbon emission reduction from the nine provinces will be more than 6 million tons carbon dioxide. So that would be a very big amount. So we hope that in the future we can adopt some better measures with co-benefit and with more emission reduction potential," Dr. Liu Qiang, dir. strategy&planning dept., Nat. center for climate change strategy&int'l coop. said.

This will hopefully help bring back the bright blue sky.