Since Premier Li Keqiang declared a ‘War on Pollution’ in China in 2014 what’s been the progress so far? In a nutshell, and I could leave it here, tremendous!
Michael Greenstone (et al.) of the University of Chicago sums it up more elegantly in the paper highlighted today thus:
“China’s recent experiences are without historical precedent, both in terms of the speed with which the quality and availability of information on pollution have increased and the rapidity of the decline in air pollution concentrations. Further, China’s ambition to lower air pollution has only become more intense in recent years.”
Rather than giving a full audit of progress the research summarizes the many directions analysis of various improvements is now going in and gives pointers if, say, your specific interest is improvement in soil quality.
There are some useful charts and here are two showing manifest progress.
Skeptics will push-back here with ‘Ah, well, that’s China so the data is probably wobbly’. The authors address this potential shortcoming in their work and explain why data on all this, today in fact, is remarkably good.
..and it’s not just air quality that’s on the up and up..
You can access the work in full via the following link China’s War on Pollution.
Happy Sunday.