Abstracts
Each year air pollution in China claims hundreds of thousands of lives. The root cause is an economy dependent on coal and heavy industry in combination with continued emissions from inefficient household stoves in hundreds of millions of homes and from open burning of crop waste in the field. The dependency on coal is also the reason why China emits far more carbon dioxide (CO2) than any other nation. The Chinese central government is aware of the problems and has set reasonably ambitious targets for air quality. There is significant progress in terms of introducing abatement technologies. The progress in reducing coal dependency is less obvious; moreover, the government hesitates to use effective policies.
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Notes
- 1.
Greenhouse gas emissions are not strictly air pollution. Greenhouse gases affect the global climate, but by air pollution we mean dirty air that potentially damages health and ecosystems. Hence we distinguish between air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
- 2.
See also the web pages of the World Health Organization (WHO) http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/about/en/ and the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation http://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/.
- 3.
Some may protest that traffic is a main source of one of the compounds, NOx. But that seems so far not to be the case in China, see, for example, Zhao et al. (2013a).
- 4.
- 5.
The measurement of national emissions is surprisingly difficult. It requires quality monitoring of actual emissions from thousands, if not millions, of stacks as well as accounting precisely for the chemical content of energy sources, for example, how much sulfur in coal. In the case of NOx it requires information on the properties of combustion (e.g., the furnace heat) as well. NH3 is emitted from the fields in agriculture and depends on fertilizer use, and from the decomposition of livestock manure, both of which are difficult to quantify precisely. VOC is fugitive; it slips away, for example, from gasoline pumps and is not easily measured. In practice any estimate of emissions of air pollutants is uncertain. The change in emissions may be somewhat more certain as one may assume that some sources of uncertainty cancel.
- 6.
A different and even more effective technology called fabric filter seems to be used less.
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Vennemo, H., Aunan, K. (2018). Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in China: An Unsustainable Situation in Search of a Solution. In: Brinkmann, R., Garren, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71389-2_8
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