Water pollution in China

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NY Times, February 10, 2010
China Report Shows More Pollution in Waterways
By JONATHAN ANSFIELD and KEITH BRADSHER

BEIJING — China’s government on Tuesday unveiled its most detailed 
survey ever of the pollution plaguing the country, revealing that 
water pollution in 2007 was more than twice as severe as official 
figures that had long omitted agricultural waste.

The first-ever national pollution census, environmentalists said, 
represented a small step forward for China in terms of 
transparency. But the results also raised serious questions about 
the shortcomings of China’s previous pollution data and suggested 
that even with limited progress in some areas, the country still 
had a long way to go to clean its waterways and air.

The pollution census, scheduled to be repeated in 2020, took more 
than two years to complete. It involved 570,000 people, and 
included 1.1 billion pieces of data from nearly 6 million sources 
of pollution, including factories, farms, homes and 
pollution-treatment facilities, the government announced at a news 
conference.

But the comprehensiveness of the survey also resulted in stark 
discrepancies between some of the calculations and annual figures 
that the government has published in the past.

By far the biggest of these involved China’s total discharge of 
chemical oxygen demand — the main gauge of water pollution. These 
discharges totaled 30.3 million tons in 2007, the census showed.

In recent years the Ministry of Environmental Protection has done 
a much narrower calculation of these discharges, excluding 
agricultural effluents like fertilizers and pesticides as well as 
fluids leaking from landfills. By that narrower measure, 
discharges came to only 13.8 million tons in 2007, which officials 
described at the time as a decline of more than 3 percent from 
2006 and a “turning point.”

Zhang Lijun, the vice minister of environmental protection, sought 
to play down the differences with previous data. He noted that the 
census counted 13.2 million tons of agricultural effluents for the 
first time, and another 324,600 tons of discharges from landfills.

The census keepers had also employed updated methodologies and 
reached many more parts of the countryside and industrial sites 
than had official statistics, which helped account for the much 
larger figure in the census, Mr. Zhang said. Were it not for the 
vastly expanded scope of the survey, the chemical oxygen demand 
level in 2007 would stand at only 5.3 percent higher than 
previously calculated, he said.

Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental 
Affairs, a nonprofit research group in Beijing, said that 
government planners estimated that the country’s rivers and lakes 
could handle only 7.4 million tons a year of chemical oxygen 
demand. The scale and significance of agricultural effluent was 
seldom recognized in previous government planning, which focused 
on bringing down mainly industrial emissions to around 7 million 
tons a year from 13.8 million tons, said Mr. Ma, a leading expert 
on water pollution in China.

The new total of more than 30 million tons suggests a much bigger 
problem. “We believed we needed to cut our emissions in half, but 
today’s data means a lot more work needs to be done,” Mr. Ma said.

The extent of agricultural waste could prove a more intractable 
problem than the many factories dumping effluent into China’s 
rivers and lakes.

“When it’s millions of farmers, it’s more difficult to bring it 
under control,” Mr. Ma said.

Steven Ma, of the Beijing office of Greenpeace, said that the 
government’s decision to calculate and release figures for 
agriculture would start to have an effect on the policy debate 
over water pollution in China. “Everybody knew there was a problem 
with agricultural pollution in China, but now there are numbers,” 
he said.

Mr. Zhang said that the findings of the census were roughly in 
line with official expectations. “There were no major surprises,” 
he said.

Based on the narrower approach, officials say China is on track to 
meet or exceed the nation’s pollution goals: to trim levels of 
chemical oxygen demand as well as sulfur dioxide, a major air 
pollutant, by 10 percent between 2005 and 2010. For now, the 
census would not change how those targets are evaluated, Mr. Zhang 
said.

“Current results of the census will not be linked to environmental 
performance,” he added.

In terms of sulfur dioxide emissions in 2007, in fact, the census 
totaled only 23.2 million tons, compared with 24.7 million tons in 
the official data released in 2008. But census figures for other 
important metrics, such as soot and ammonia nitrogen, another 
indicator of water quality, were higher than the previous data by 
double-digit percentages.

The census also broke down China’s pollution toll into a 
considerably greater number of categories and sectors than the 
government does regularly. Some Chinese environmentalists and 
media outlets took particular note of the amount of poisonous 
discharge of heavy metals like arsenic, mercury and lead, a 
frequent source of protests in towns and villages over mass 
contamination from nearby factories.

The census would help the government take a more “targeted and 
focused” approach to combating pollution in coming years, Mr. 
Zhang said. The government has indicated it will add emissions of 
ammonia nitrogen and nitrogen oxides, which are discharged from 
vehicles and power plants, to a list of reduction targets from 
2011 to 2015.

Jonathan Ansfield reported from Beijing, and Keith Bradsher from 
Hong Kong. Zhang Jing contributed research.

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