China Still Facing an Uphill Struggle in the Fight Against Pollution
It has been a while since China started its war against air pollution and climate control. Even though they have been getting slight improvements it is not even a bit enough for the long run of the country.
The country's environment minister said that while the country’s air quality has improved a bit compared to the past decade,the situation is still pretty grim and solid,the hardest challenges are still need to be tackled.
The National People’s Congress had recently arranged a press conference,Li Ganjie,the minister of ecology and Environment spoke at the conference,he showed the statistics and said that the number of good weather days in 338 major cities rose upto 79.3 per cent in 2018,it had gone up 1.3 percentage points from a year ago.
But that is not all it,we all know air pollution poisons the air for us humans but the particle which causes this is PM2.5-It is the deadly particles that are most harmful to human health,from the given statistics, the average concentration of this particle had fallen by 9.3 percent.
But this still is nothing to celebrate about because despite this improvement the minister of environment had said there should be no let-up and no one should lower their guard against this battle against pollution and the country still has a long way to go and still needs to do more to tackle this problem.
He also added that the country had done the easy “bit” and the remaining parts are very challenging and it is the part that actually matters because the situation is very tight and dangerous as it is.
“We have achieved some basic success after about 18 months of hard work and we will make public the results of our research and actions as we go from one stage to another,” Li said.
From all this it is very clear that China has taken this problem very seriously, the country’s leadership has made cleaning up the environment one of its three most important missions, along with poverty eradication and controlling financial risk, and delivering on these critical tasks is considered a sacred mission for the Communist Party.the government outlined a three-year action plan targeting air pollution in three major regions, namely the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area, the Yangtze River Delta and the North China plain straddling Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces.
The minister also said that officials falsifying data was another key obstacle to cleaning up the country’s skies. He cited the April 2017 example of a collective fraud in Linyi, Shanxi province, where 16 officials in the city’s Environmental Protection Bureau were caught manipulating air quality figures in an attempt to hide excessive air pollution from the public.
Investigations later showed the gang had tampered with six air monitoring stations over the course of a year to cause them to give incorrect readings.
Li said all 16 had been sentenced for their crimes last May, adding: “I don’t think any one of us would have imagined that 16 officials could have been sentenced for environmental crimes in the past but we did exactly this for this serious case in Linyi.”
Basically the country is on the road to improvement while there still may exist some struggle here and there but it is nothing the collective mind of both the people and the government can't get over.