The Spat Over PM2.5 Monitoring
The war of words between the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the US Embassy is heating up over the latter’s monitoring of pollution levels in the Chinese capital and Shanghai. The US Embassy has set up Twitter feeds (@BeijingAir and twitter.com/cgshanghaiair) for hourly updates. The embassy and consulate use MetOne BAM 1020 and Echotech EC 9810 monitors on rooftops to check ozone and PM2.5 particulates. The Twitter feeds are followed by more than 20,000 people presumably mostly outside China since the service is not available in the country.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin claimed the monitoring contravened the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic relations and urged foreign legations (without mentioning the US Embassy by name) to respect China’s laws and regulations and desist from issuing readings “especially over the Internet”. “If foreign embassies want to collect this kind of information for their own staff and diplomats, I think it’s up to them (but) they can’t release this information to the outside world”, blasted Mr Liu earlier this week.
The US State Department responded that its monitoring violated neither Chinese laws nor the Vienna Convention and therefore would not cease. In fact, Spokesman Mark Toner considered it a model for other missions around the world to follow. “This is an initiative by the embassy in Beijing, by the mission in China, to convey what we believe is useful information to our citizens abroad. It’s primarily directed to American citizens, but in terms of Chinese accessing this information, we don’t have a problem with it”, Mr Toner told the press
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) converts PM2.5 readings (particulates smaller than 2.5 micrometers) into an air quality index (AQI) ranging from 0 to 300+ to help determine the health effects of polluted air. A value of 50, for instance, represents good air quality but any value around 300 or over can be hazardous to your health.
Aside from the US Embassy’s Twitter feeds, this author found a hourly-updated bilingual AQI monitoring service for many major cities in China – www.aqicn.info. At the time of writing (latest reading was at 1900 hours, June 7, 2012), the readings for Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin were 170, 148 and 107 respectively, all considered unhealthy. Guangzhou scored 92, Dalian 71, and Chengdu 55, meaning moderate pollution. The sole surprising bright spot was Shenzhen which scored 43 for good air, considering that it is major hub for manufacturing in the Pearl River Delta.
Following precedents in Beijing and Shanghai, Chongqing, China’s biggest municipality, will set up 17 PM2.5 monitoring stations across its main urban districts in July. By the end of October, test runs of PM2.5 monitoring stations will be extended to another 74 cities throughout the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Area, the Pearl River Delta, and the Yangtze River Delta. Monitoring results will be released by the end of the year.
Air quality remains extremely bad in Chinese cities with Beijing fairing much worse than its southern counterparts, owing to the mixture of dust and sand from Inner Mongolia, aerosols, car exhaust, and smokestack fumes. In an unreleased report based on government data last December, the World Bank said average PM2.5 concentrations in northern Chinese cities exceeded US limits by 5 to 6 times and were 2 to 4 times worse than southern Chinese cities. 9 of 13 major cities failed more than half the time to meet even the initial annual mean target for developing countries set by the World Health Organization (WHO) which environmentalists and experts expect will be adopted by China as its PM2.5 standard.
Wang Yuesi, chief air-pollution scientist at China’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics, forecast that it will take China at least 20 years to reach that target, if stronger measures are not adopted to rein in emissions. Since 1998, Mr Wang told Outlook Weekly, an influential Chinese periodical owned by the Xinhua News Agency, Beijing’s PM2.5 concentrations have been rising by 3-4% annually. He explained the thick haze that frequently envelops the capital is caused by finer MP2.5 particulates that absorb more sunlight.
The following is a ranking for the air quality of Chinese municipalities and provincial capitals for 2011 (based on particulates greater than PM2.5 (?)):
(notice that Beijing is near rock bottom, just a couple notches above Lanzhou)
1 Haikou
2 Kunming
3 Lhasa
4 Guangzhou
5 Fuzhou
6 Nanning
7 Guiyang
8 Hohhot
9 Nanchang
10 Changchun
11 Changsha
12 Shanghai
13 Yinchuan
14 Hangzhou
15 Shenyang
16 Chongqing
17 Tianjin
18 Shijiazhuang
19 Chengdu
20 Nanjing
21 Jinan
22 Xining
23 Harbin
24 Zhengzhou
25 Taiyuan
26 Wuhan
27 Xi’an
28 Hefei
29 Beijing
30 Urumqi
31 Lanzhou
(Rankings measured the days with first-grade and second-grade air quality in a year. Data are from air quality daily reports issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection.)
(source: China Daily)