| In recent months, the press has been filled with stories of the extraordinary efforts the Chinese government is making to assure that environmental conditions meet world approval during the 2008 Olympics. Earlier this summer, the city of Qingdao mobilized thousands of people to clean up an algal bloom that choked the coastline and threatened Olympic sailing competitions. In Beijing and neighboring cities, factories will be closed to a surrounding distance of 300 kilometers In Beijing itself, government vehicle traffic was cut by 70 percent and private vehicles were already put under an alternate driving-day restriction, two moves that are expected to reduce 40 percent of the 3.3 million vehicles on its streets. Such unparalleled actions have paid off – at least temporarily: the air over Beijing cleared a few days before the Olympic opening day. |  Sandra A. Hoffmann Fellow |
But, of course, the real impact of pollution in China has less to do with the Olympics than with the sustained exposure that the Chinese population faces. China’s remarkable economic growth over the past 25 years, spurred by massive industrialization, has had severe environmental consequences. Fine particulate levels (PM 10) levels in major Chinese cities are roughly twice World Health Organization guidelines and three to four times those typically seen the U. S. or European cities. In meeting rising energy demands, China has become the world’s largest emitter of sulfur dioxide emissions. Water supply and quality, which are strongly affected by both industrial pollution and biological waste, have been a focus of public concern in the past few years.
China has made strides toward implementation of more effective environmental quality management. Significant progress was made during the 1980s and 1990s, but those advances have slowed markedly in the past decade. For example, energy efficiency—which increased markedly from 7.5 tons of coal per 10,000 Yuan of GDP in the 1980s to roughly 2.5 tons in the late 1990s—has stagnated since then. Likewise, urban air quality improvements were in the 1980s and 1990s, but have stalled in the past decade due in no small part to the rise in car ownership, up 31 percent between 1990 and 2003.
Despite this gloomy recent performance, China is in a good position to move more aggressively to address these environmental quality problems. One of the opportunities presented by its rapid industrialization is the financial resources to take advantage not only of modern pollution control technologies but also decades of experience throughout the world with designing more effective pollution control policies. The challenge ahead is finding means of efficiently controlling pollution without unduly slowing the economic growth that lifted an estimated 400 million people above the extreme poverty line between 1980 and 2000.
Efficient pollution policy requires information. RFF Senior Fellow Alan Krupnick and I are working with a World Bank, Norwegian and Chinese team of scientists and economists to model the health and productivity impacts of air and water pollution In China. The model is national in scope and regional in detail. It provides both a baseline picture of pollution impacts and builds China’s capacity to assess the effectiveness of pollution control efforts. By combining Chinese ambient monitoring data with international and locally estimated dose-response functions, the model makes it possible for China to evaluate changes in the impacts of pollution on human health, agriculture, fisheries, and physical infrastructure over time. By valuing impacts in monetary terms, it also provides a means of comparing otherwise incommensurable alternatives. As part of this project, we conducted some of the first surveys in China estimating people’s willingness to pay reductions in their risks of death associated with air pollution. This international collaboration marks a significant step toward developing a green accounting system and toward developing the essential information infrastructure for efficient pollution control in China.
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