Up in smoke

Steven Q. Andrews, a Washington DC-based environmental consultant, has written a very revealing piece in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that the official air pollution statistics for Beijing are both misleading and artificially low. Andrews points out that in 2006, the State Environmental Protection Agency stopped taking air quality readings from two city centre monitoring stations, replacing them with three new monitoring centers located in the suburbs where the air was less polluted. Yet this change in reporting locations was not taken into account in compiling year-on-year comparisons of the Chinese capital’s air pollution. This revelation calls into question claims that Beijing’s air has seen five straight years of improvements:

“Calculating the average daily Beijing API values for 2006 and 2007 using data from the original monitoring stations changes the outcome considerably; in fact, 38 of Beijing’s 241 so-called “blue sky” days in 2006 would not have qualified as “blue sky” under the old methodology. The number is even less for 2007: 55 fewer days would have attained the “blue sky” standard, out of 246 reported “blue sky” days. That translates into fewer “blue sky” days as a whole than in 2002 (which had 203 reported “blue sky” days), immediately after Beijing was awarded the Olympics.”

This apparent massaging of statistics comes as little surprise. The government has made a great play of its efforts to clean up Beijing’s air in the run-up to the Olympics, but Beijing residents have long queried its assertions. Every evening Beijing TV station runs a pollution report, which almost without fail reports that the air quality over the past 24 hours has been “excellent”, or “very good”, when the days have in fact been so smoggy that you can barely see across the street. Interestingly, Sina.com used to include air quality on its city-by-city forecasts, and its assessments used to be more honest – Beijing’s air quality was almost invariably rated as “poor” – but this has now been replaced by a new category telling users whether tomorrow will be a good day for a spot of fishing instead (Unsurprisingly, given the fact that all of the city’s rivers and lakes are frozen solid, it says that it’ll be too cold to go fishing tomorrow – just in case you were thinking of dusting off your rods and deckchair.)

The point is that massaging statistics is not the way to solve a problem – people are not going to be fooled. Andrews goes on to quote a recent report by Peking University’s Environmental Science department, which calculated that pollution resulted in 25,000 deaths in Beijing in 2002 alone, and cost the city the equivalent of 7.2% of its GDP. Beijing is desperate to present itself as a showcase metropolis for the 21st century and in many aspects it is succeeding. But poor air quality is something you cannot hide, no matter how hard the authorities try. Since returning to Beijing after two weeks at home for Christmas and New Year, I have realized just how bad the air here is, and I would rank it without doubt as the single biggest issue impacting on my quality of life over here, and the main reason why I could never, long-term, see myself settling down here for good. I don’t think I’m alone: a good family friend whom I had lunch with while I was back in London told me that herself and her husband, who both work for a big multinational, are thinking of applying for a transfer abroad and visited Beijing last summer to scope it out as a potential destination. “But as soon as I breathed in a lungful of smog, I knew I couldn’t do it,” she said.

The authorities have a difficult dilemma. The country’s breakneck growth has been built on cheap, polluting energy. It is aware of the need to adopt cleaner energy forms, but it has to balance its environmental concerns while at the same time ensuring continued economic growth. Positive steps are being taken. But by being dishonest with its figures, the authorities are undoing much of this good work. When I can see the Western Hills from my kitchen window day-in, day-out, I’ll believe that Beijing’s air quality is getting better. But until that day arrives, I’ll be treating official pollution statistics with a very large pinch of salt indeed.

MP