China considering green tax as extent of air and water pollution is revealed

Telegraph
February 10, 2010
By Peter Foster in Beijing

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The national survey, which took 570,000 staff two years to complete, also revealed China's intensive farming practices were almost equally to blame for pollution as its many factories and coal-fired power stations.

Announcing the results of China's first official nationwide pollution survey China's vice minister of environmental protection, Zhang Lijun, said that ministries were now studying the possibility of environmental taxes on polluters.

However he added that China may be approaching peak pollution levels faster than many countries at the same stage of industrial development.

"Because China's path to economic development has been different from that taken by developed nations, China may well pass the peak polluting levels and see marked improvement by the time our per capita income reaches the $3,000 level," Zhang said.

Pollution has become a major source of discontent and social unrest in China with almost daily protests about lead and other chemical pollution, fumes from rubbish incinerators and run-off from landfill sites.

Environmental activists welcomed the new report, but complained that the results of the pollution survey will not be made public for a year to enable China's government to shape its next five-year plan.

"We urge the government to immediately establish a strong platform through which the public could easily access a wide range of pollution data," Sze Pang Cheung, campaign director for Greenpeace China, said in a statement.

Opening up the survey results would let the Chinese public monitor the country's biggest polluters and the worst polluted areas, added Yu Jie, head of policy and research programs for The Climate Group China.

The inclusion of pollution data from China's farming industries, which make heavy use of pesticides and nitrogen-based fertilizers, caused previous estimates of water-pollution levels to more than double.

The census, based on 2007 data, found that discharge of "chemical oxygen demand" (COD) - a measure of water pollution - in wastewater was 30.3 million tonnes, with agricultural sources accounting for 43.7 percent of the nationwide total.

China has invested billions of dollars in cleaning up its rivers and lakes, but more than 200 million Chinese do not have access to safe drinking water, government data says.

The inclusion of farm pollution data, for a long time ignored or downplayed in China was welcomed by experts who said the survey should become a "turning point" in China's polluting farming practices.

"That's huge," said Deborah Seligsohn, principal adviser for the World Resources Institute on China's climate and energy issues, "Many challenges China faces in terms of water quality come from organic pollution rather than from chemicals."

"We must make prevention and control of pollution from agricultural sources our top priority for environmental protection, to resolve the problem of water pollution in China at the root," concluded Mr Zhang, the vice minister.

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