UK, China experts come together to battle Beijing’s smog

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have underlined the urgent need for Chinese megacities to identify sources that contribute to the lingering air pollution.

With a total investment of £2.6 million ($3.2 million), researchers from China and the UK launched a project last year to address air pollution sources in Beijing.

The project was led by seven UK universities, along with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University.

Under the project, major field observations have been set up in the city, hoping to identify the concentrations and sources of urban pollution. The project will continue until 2020.

“The London smog in the 1950s was perhaps easier to deal with than the air pollution in Beijing today,” William J. Bloss, professor of atmosphere science at Birmingham, said at a workshop for the project in Beijing on Thursday.

“It is related to the source being largely a single phenomenon of burning dirty coal with high sulfur content in the city for power generation, heating and industries.”

In December 1952, the Great London Smog killed 4,000 people in the UK. Experts later revised the death toll to more than 12,000.

“But nowadays we face air pollution problems with small particles and nitrogen dioxide. If we look back to source origins, we can identify industries, power generation, heating, vehicles and agricultural emissions,” said Bloss. “It is a mixture of primary pollutants and secondary ones formed in the atmosphere.”

“The challenge for Beijing is to understand how all these ingredients come together to generate the haze, and from that we can identify the best emission-control measures to improve the situation,” added Bloss.

“The key lies in the development of clean energy tools to cut coal emissions,” said Professor Li Jinghai, former vicepresident of CAS.

For instance, a new technique has been introduced to rural residents in Shandong province by his academy to replace the old coal burning boilers with more energy-efficient ones.

Further cooperation between scientists from the UK and China also included river ecosystems and using fossil research to better understand how past steps can tackle current climate issues.