What India can learn from China in ridding its skies of pollution

The morning of December 16 began with crystal clear blue skies over Beijing. From my apartment, I could even see the mountains 50 km away to the far west of the city. But that was the calm before the storm.

The previous evening, the Beijing government put out the first pollution "red alert" of the year. Alerts are issued when levels of PM 2.5 particulate pollution is forecast to cross hazardous levels of 200 for consecutive days - a warning system that Delhi, for instance, could certainly use given that it suffers from regular hazardous air quality.

By Friday evening, a blanket of smog had descended over Beijing, choking the city. The return of the smog has certainly underlined the persisting air pollution problem plaguing the Chinese capital.

At the same time, the extraordinary measures that Beijing has taken to battle the problem serve as an example to other cities plagued by bad air. As much as Beijing gets the bad headlines, it’s actually turning out to be a good case study of what it takes to battle the bad air - and how difficult and long the road ahead is even for states that actually get their act together.

Following Thursday’s five-day red alert — the highest of a fourtier system of blue, yellow and orange warnings — authorities have imposed sweeping restrictions on vehicles, construction sites and coal plants. Odd and even number car limits have been temporarily imposed. (Beijing usually limits cars only one day of the week, according to the last digit of a licence plate number.)

Kindergartens and primary schools have been closed, so that young children don’t have to venture outdoors. Several people I spoke to have used the five-day school holiday to leave the city, heading to China’s coastal south or to the far west of the country. Hundreds of factories have either limited or entirely stopped production.

Despite the present bout of bad air, the general trend over the past three years reflects improving air quality, says Dong Liansai, climate campaigner for Greenpeace in Beijing. "Comparing 189 cities in China, the overall PM 2.5 decreased by 10.3 per cent from 2014 to 2015," he tells Mail Today, speaking in Greenpeace’s massive office in an old Beijing neighbourhood.

Environmentally friendly e-bikes and bicycles are parked all over the three-floor office-space, which is populated by several dozen eager young Chinese, all in their early 20s, who are passionate about cleaning their country’s skies and rivers.

Greenpeace notes that there was progress in the first half of this year, when the speed of improvement in air quality continued to increase. This year, on average, is expected to be better than 2015, although an industrial rebound from the middle of the year has somewhat slowed the pace of improvement.

The rebound is thought to be one of the reasons behind the current airpocalypse, coupled with an uptick in coal production triggered by a rise in coal prices and surging power demand from mid-November when central heating systems across northern China were switched on.

Dong says the hope is this is temporary. The larger trend shows China is moving away from coal, with emissions falling year-on-year. The share of coal in the total energy mix will fall below 63 per cent in the next year, down from 75 per cent a few years ago. The 2020 target is 62 per cent, likely to be met three years ahead of schedule.

China is powering ahead with expanding wind and solar power, building capacities bigger than anywhere else in the world, capacities it’s now keen to export to India (work has already begun on a first Chinese solar park in Andhra Pradesh). China is adding 46GW of wind and solar every year, and is surpassing its annual targets. Its 2020 target of 300GW wind capacity is likely to be met by 2018.

A new environmental law has raised fines for polluters. Perhaps the most key takeaway is the need for effective monitoring. Nine out of every 10 plants in China are equipped with scrubbers — used to clean up industrial emissions — and realtime third-party monitors that alert authorities when a particular plant reaches its emissions cap for the year.

If you cross your limit, you have to pay. Simple as that. That’s one idea we could certainly borrow as we look to clean up our own skies.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

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