China is winning war on pollution
On March 4, 2014, the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, told almost 3,000 delegates at the National People’s Congress and many more watching live on state television, “We will resolutely declare war against pollution as we declared war against poverty.”
The statement broke from the country’s long-standing policy of putting economic growth over the environment, and many wondered whether China would really follow through.
Four years after that declaration, the data is in: China is winning, at record pace. In particular, cities have cut concentrations of fine particulates in the air by 32 percent on average, in just those four years.
The speed of the antipollution drive has raised important questions about its human costs. But if China sustains these reductions, recent research by my colleagues and me indicates that residents will see significant improvements to their health, extending their life spans by months or years.
How did China get here? In the months before the premier’s speech, the country released a national air quality action plan that required all urban areas to reduce concentrations of fine particulate matter pollution by at least 10 percent, more in some cities. The Beijing area was required to reduce pollution by 25 percent, and the city set aside $120 billion for that purpose.
To reach these targets, China prohibited new coal-fired power plants in the country’s most polluted regions, including the Beijing area. Existing plants were told to reduce their emissions. If they didn’t, the coal was replaced with natural gas. Large cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, restricted the number of cars on the road. The country also reduced its ironand steelmaking capacity and shut down coal mines.
Some of the actions went from aggressive to extraordinary. For example, the ministry of environmental protection released a 143-page “battle plan” last summer that included removing the coal boilers many homes and businesses used for winter heating — even though replacements were not yet available everywhere. This left some homeowners, businesses and even students without heat this winter.
Over the past few months, news began to trickle in that the efforts were working. Although most regions outpaced their targets, the most populated cities had some of the greatest declines.
To investigate the effects on people’s lives in China, I used two of my studies to convert the fine particulate concentrations into their effect on life spans. This is the same method that underlies the Air Quality-Life Index. These studies are based on data from China, so they don’t require extrapolation from the United States or some other country with relatively low concentrations of pollution.
The results suggest that China’s fight against pollution has already laid the foundation for gains in life expectancy.
The U.S. Clean Air Act is widely regarded as having produced large reductions in air pollution. In the four years after its 1970 enactment, U.S. air pollution declined by 20 percent on average. But it took about a dozen years and the 1981-82 recession for the United States to achieve the 32 percent reduction China has achieved in just four years.
Whether Chinese citizens can expect to capture these additional improvements — and even sustain the existing gains — comes back to the balance between economic growth and environmental quality.
It is an approach that has come with some real costs — as the many people left without heat this winter could attest.
It would be quite a twist if so-called Communist China ultimately wins the war against pollution by embracing marketbased regulations, while the United States continues to use them only intermittently.