Beijing taking measures to become a cleaner city

What say you on the issue below?

WHICH city do you like most - Shanghai or Beijing? This has been a question I have answered most since my relocation to the Chinese capital.

My standard reply whenever I landed at the Beijing airport, was that I couldn’t see the skyline and it was hazy. But, over the past month, I found that Beijing is not that bad after all. The visibility in the first few days was rather poor with haze blocking the sunlight. After several days, the sky cleared in the late afternoon.

I must have enjoyed two to three days of nice weather. This was consistent with the figures given by the Beijing Municipal Environment Protection Bureau. The bureau’s air quality data showed that last month the city recorded 28 days with a level of Grade 2 and above and only three days of Grade 3 (mild pollution) air quality.

So far, there have been 199 days of Grade 2 and above air quality, which was 20 days more than the corresponding period last year. With four months left, the bureau should not have problems meeting its 260-day target for the whole year.

Do I have breathing problems or skin allergy? So far so good. My friends who have been here long enough gave me the assurance that the worst is over as the pollution situation was more critical before the Olympic Games last year.

Let us go back to the pre-Games. China came under tremendous attack and criticism for having poor air quality in Beijing. The city even reached Grade 5 (critical level) about two months before the Games and Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie withdrew from the marathon due to air pollution.

Then, air quality in and around Beijing suddenly changed for the better during the Games, thanks to the efforts by the authorities such as banning cars on alternate days depending on the last digit of the vehicles’ number plates, stopping construction projects and reducing the use of coal in favour of natural gas for electricity.

One might have thought the international media’s fuss about the city’s air pollution would stop after the Games but it has not.

Recently, a study by Oregon State University in the United States found that air pollution exceeded what is considered safe and about a third higher than what was reported by Chinese officials during the Games.

Considering the massive efforts by China to reduce air pollution in and around Beijing during the Olympics, this was the largest scale atmospheric pollution experiment ever conducted, Staci Simonich, an associate professor of environmental and molecular toxicology at the university, said in a published journal. Despite all that, some evenings it was rain and favourable shifts in the winds that provided the most relief from the pollution.

The amount of particulate in the air in the city was about double the level of the previous Games in Athens. Peking University, where the research was conducted, brushed aside the international reports and expressed doubts on the credibility of the research by the university.

College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering professor Zhu Tong said determining the cause of air pollution was a complicated process. More so, the results of these researches have shown that the air pollution index is pretty good. Another study by Cornell University showed that the air in the city during the Games was cleaner than the year before.

The International Olympics Committee was so satisfied with Beijing’s efforts for hosting a cleaner Games that it presented the Sport and the Environment Award to the Beijing Games organising committee in March.

It’s common knowledge to Beijing residents that the contributing factors of air pollution in the city are the increase in the number of vehicles, emissions from factories, dust from project sites and sandstorm from Inner Mongolia.

Beijing is nevertheless on the right track to become a cleaner city. This is based on the determination shown by the Chinese authorities in keeping the environment-friendly policies and introducing others such as closure order for smaller coal mines in Shanxi and Hebei provinces.

Who can resist from taking the subway for only two yuan (RM1) for all routes, or the bus for 0.40 yuan, anyway? This has taken hundreds of thousands of cars off the road to make the city a better place.