Two notable additions to the blogroll:

ChinaFAQs, a new web project from the World Resources Institute featuring excellent information and commentary;

MyHealthBeijing, a blog written by Beijing-based family doctor Richard Saint Cyr, who frequently writes about air pollution. His posts contain both excellent commentary as well as links to scientific research, especially on health impacts. Last October, he posted this terrific presentation he gave with an overview of air pollution in Beijing and what the health risks are:

This China Daily report also mentions Beijing’s 2009 Blue Sky Day total, 285, representing the first time I’ve seen it mentioned in English-language domestic media (although Xinhua covered the accomplishment in Chinese on 1/1.)

Recent targets and totals are shown below. Note that the 2010 target is below the number of Blue Sky Days achieved in both 2008 and 2009.

Here are some rough and quick translations of some key parts:

今年我市空气质量二级和好于二级的天数累计达到285天，占78.1%，比去年多11天，比市委市政府确定的全年空气质量改善目标260个达标天多25天，实现了空气质量连续11年持续改善。

“This year, the number of days at Grade II or better reached 285, 78.1% of the year, which is 11 more days than last year. The total is 25 days more than the municipal government’s goal of 260 days. We have realized 11 years of continuous air quality improvement.”

今年的空气质量改善，呈现出三个特点：

一是全年目标完成时间早。今年提前41天完成全年空气质量改善目标，是自1999年以来完成全年目标时间最早的年份。

“There are three key characteristics to this year’s air quality improvement:

First, we reached the annual goal early. This year’s air quality improvement goal was met 41 days early, the earliest we have met the annual goal since 1999.”

二是达标天数明显增多，四级以上中重度污染天数明显减少。今年二级和好于二级天数285天，比2000年以来同期平均高16.8个百分点，四级以上天数 5天，是十年来同期中重度污染天数最少的一年，比2000年同期减少18天。

“Second, the number of days meeting the standard has increased obviously, while the number of days of Grade IV or worse (moderate/heavy pollution) has decreased obviously. This year the number of days at Grade II or better was 285, an improvement over 2000 of 16.8 percentage points. There were only five days of Grade IV or worse, the lowest of any year of the past 10, and 18 less than the year 2000.”

三是大气主要污染物浓度下降明显，二氧化硫和可吸入颗粒物等污染物创11年同期最低。据初步统计，大气中来源复杂的可吸入颗粒物浓度11年来同期降至120微克/立方米左右，比2008年奥运年同期还下降约0.8%；与燃煤密切相关的二氧化硫在达到国家标准后持续下降，比去年同期下降5.6%；二者均达到近11年最低，比2000年同期分别下降52.1%、25.3%。

“Third, the concentration of major pollutants has decreased obviously; SO2 and inhalable particles etc. are the lowest in 11 years. According to initial analysis, the concentration of the source complex of inhalable particles fell over the last 11 years to 120 ug/m^3, a reduction of about 0.8% below the Olympic year last year. SO2, which has a close relationship to burning of coal, has continued to drop even after meeting the national standard, dropping 5.6% from last year. Both of which are the lowest in 11 years, reduced from 2000 by 52.1% and 25.3%, respectively.”

回顾2009年，我市空气质量总体上较好…

“Reflecting on 2009, our city’s air quality on the whole was relatively good…”

The note continues by describing the policies that have been implemented to improve air quality, including implementing the Outlook on Scientific Development, adjusting industrial structure, scrapping yellow-label vehicles, vigorously controlling dust, increasing use of natural gas instead of coal, etc., plus increased general public support and participation.

It concludes:

尽管2009年我市空气质量目标提前完成了，但大气环境质量与国家标准、市民期望和建设世界城市的要求还有一定差距。今后，北京将继续贯彻落实科学发展观，按照建设“人文北京、科技北京、绿色北京”要求，继承奥运宝贵环境财富，加大污染防治工作力度，继续推进大气环境质量改善进程，强化水污染治理，控制噪声污染，全面推动各项环保工作和首都生态环境质量迈上新台阶。

“Although our city met its 2009 air quality goal early, there is still a gap between the current air quality and the requirements of the national standard, the public’s hope, and building an international city. From today on, Beijing will continue to follow and implement the Outlook on Scientific Development, and, in accordance with the requirements of building a “Cultural Beijing, Scientific  Beijing, Green Beijing,” will carry on the precious Olympic environmental wealth. We will increase work efforts to prevent and control air pollution, continue promoting improvements in air quality, strengthen water pollution treatment, control noise pollution, and comprehensively promote all types of environmental protection work and raise the capital’s eco-environmental quality to a new level.”

Comments:

I’m a glass-is-half-full kind of person, but celebrating a 0.8% decrease in particulate pollution when you are still 20% above your own national standard? Seriously? And calling your air quality “relatively good on the whole” (”我市空气质量总体上较好”)? While it may be true that the air quality is good relative to 2000, a claim like that is pretty disingenuous, given that Beijing’s air quality is still terrible by international standards. The SO2 drop is encouraging news, as is the decrease in Grade IV+ days, but what about the conspicuously missing third pollutant that’s reported daily, NO2? I guess we’ll have to wait until the mid-year environmental report for that. In the meantime, at least it’s nice to see the acknowledgment (at the end) that Beijing’s air quality still isn’t meeting the national standard – seems this information is usually left out of these announcements.

Related: Summary of Beijing’s 2009 Air Quality

First, the numbers. As usual, I’m working from air quality data downloaded from the Ministry of Environmental Protection’s datacenter. (Direct link to Beijing’s data is here.) There is a bug in the system that prevents the query function from working properly, but you can still scroll through the data and download it manually through copy and paste.

The datacenter reports 363 data points for 2009; 2/18 and 11/14 are mysteriously missing. Assuming those two days were Blue Sky Days yields a Blue Sky Day count of 285 and a calculated average PM10 concentration of 120 ug/m3.

For anyone who is new to this blog or who needs a refresher, a Blue Sky Day is a day with an Air Pollution Index (API) of 100 or below, which means that the air quality meets China’s National Grade II air quality standard – theoretically “excellent” or “good” air quality. China tallies annual number of Blue Sky Days as a consumer-friendly and easily-understood measure of air quality progress, although the metric is prone to gaming and scientifically meaningless.

PM10 means particulate matter of size 10 microns or smaller, also called “inhalable particles.” In 2009, PM10 was the reported dominant pollutant on 97% of days with an API above 50. (No dominant pollutant is reported on days with an API 50 or below.) I back-calculated PM10 from API using formulas and assumptions described here.

Trends of Blue Sky Days and PM10 concentration since 2000 are shown here:

The Good News: The good news isn’t really that good, but in the interest of balance here are some positive perspectives. First, Beijing’s count of 285 Blue Sky Days in 2009 is well above that of 2008 (274), and also well above the goal of 259. This will keep the trending up in official reporting and for boosting public morale; I imagine this fact will be spun as success / progress in the Chinese media in the days to come. I suppose another bit of good news is that Beijing has achieved what appears to be an improvement over 2008 without the boost of two months of extreme traffic restrictions and factory closures implemented last year during the Olympic period.

The Bad News: My calculated average PM10 concentration in Beijing for 2009 is 120.2 ug/m3, which less than a 1% reduction from 2008’s average. In other words, from the perspective of average particulate matter concentration, there was no improvement in air quality in Beijing from 2008 to 2009. This shows the danger of using “number of Blue Sky Days” as a metric for air quality evaluation – just because the number of Blue Sky Days increases doesn’t mean that air quality has improved.

Interestingly, as a thought experiment, let’s suppose that China’s air quality goal was that all cities should meet the Grade I air quality standard, meaning that a Blue Sky Day would have an API of 50 or below as opposed to an API of 100 or below. If we count these days (shown in the graph above in light blue), we actually see that 2009 was worse than 2008; 2008 had 62 Grade I days, while 2009 had only 47.

Most importantly, regardless of how you spin the data, Beijing’s 2009 level of inhalable particulate matter was still 20% higher than China’s own air quality standard and six times higher than the WHO’s recommended annual PM10 standard. What this means, of course, is that our work continues to be cut out for us moving into 2010 and beyond.

Related post:  Summary of Beijing’s 2008 air quality

BEIJING, Nov. 7 (Xinhua) — Major highways to Beijing have been closed as the capital and neighboring Hebei Province and Tianjin Municipality were shrouded in dense fog on Saturday…

The city’s environmental protection bureau said that the fog, which has dominated Beijing since Friday, deteriorated the city’s air quality.

Beijing recorded “serious pollution” Saturday, which was rare during this year, according to a bulletin issued by the China Environmental Monitoring Center.

The Chinese version of the story has slightly more information, mentioning that the specific weather conditions are unfavorable to pollution dispersion. I don’t doubt that the current weather (including, probably, some real fog), are contributing to the high pollution levels. Regardless, the city should do a better job warning its citizens of dangerous pollution conditions, no matter what the cause.

The BeijingAir Twitter feed has been reporting hazardous air for over 40 straight hours now…

My daughter, on the other hand, awaits heavy pollution days with bated breath. The other day, she asked, “Mommy, when will it be polluted again?” Upon questioning, I learned that on particularly bad days, her school keeps the little ones inside and lets them watch episodes of “Little Einsteins” rather than play outdoors.

Yesterday, as I walked to Elisa’s bus I paused to look around. As I surveyed the landscape around me, the brownish haze made it feel as if I were viewing the world through a sepia filter. It was odd to think that the hazardous air around me would be the source of my daughter’s good spirits. Sure enough, she stepped off the bus with a huge smile, “Mommy! It’s polluted! We got to watch “The Einsteins!” Not exactly the cultural experience I was looking for when we moved to Beijing.

I have long known that educators in the US and at international schools alter programming depending on the air quality. This is the value of real-time air quality reporting – sensitive or at-risk populations (e.g. children) can plan accordingly. With MEP’s official air quality numbers not reported until 2pm for the previous 24 hours (noon to noon), I doubt any Chinese schools have this luxury.  Does anyone know if any Chinese schools altered outdoor activity yesterday because of the hazardous air?

The pollution in Beijing right now is bad. Really bad. So bad that you can feel the heaviness, the denseness of the air as you breathe it in. It is stifling.

So how bad it is? Well, the closest thing we’ve got to real-time data, the US Embassy’s BeijingAir Twitter feed, confirms our worst fears; it has been reporting hazardous air for over 24 hours now, with over half of the hourly data points maxed out at an AQI of 500. MEP’s air quality data released this afternoon, on the other hand, shows an API of just 186, “lightly polluted” (”轻度污染”).

I wrote a lot about this discrepancy back in June when Beijing experienced a similar pollution spike. (See these posts: 6/18: air in Beijing is hazardous; 6/19: more info on Beijing’s 6/18 air quality; 6/22: US Embassy outed as source of BeijingAir Twitter feed.) In June, I posited that the hazardous pollution was not reflected in the MEP data because the MEP data is a 24-hour average, while the pollution events then only lasted for a few hours each. In this case, though, BeijingAir has been continuously reporting hazardous air since around 4pm yesterday, so it’s hard to imagine how the MEP data is still so “low.” (Low is in quotation marks because an API of 186 still represents very polluted air.)

I’m afraid I don’t have time to post more right now; I’ll try to get some graphs up this weekend. In the meantime, avoid strenuous exercise and stay inside if you can. With the Embassy-reported AQI maxed out at 500, the air is, in theory, worse than hazardous:

Beijing’s annual State of the Environment Report was released in June of this year. Even though it came out a few months ago, I haven’t written about it yet, so I want to post the link here along with some comments and translations of key figures.

2008年北京市环境状况公报 (Chinese only)
Past reports available here: http://www.bjepb.gov.cn/bjhb/tabid/375/Default.aspx

About half of the 31-page report is devoted to air quality, with primary focus on the measures taken to control air quality during the Olympics and Paralympics. But first I’d like to show the annual data, which is presented in the standard forms of trends of annual average concentrations of pollutants (decreasing) and numbers of blue sky days (increasing):

Overall, the short conclusion on annual air quality is given as follows:

Translation:

Annual Air Quality
In 2008, there were 274 days at or above Grade II air quality, 74.9% of the year. This was 89 more days and 24% higher than in 2001. Atmospheric concentrations of SO2, CO, NO2, and PM10 were 0.036, 1.4, 0.049, and0.122 mg/m3, respectively, representing reductions of 43.8%, 46.2%, 30.9%, and 26.1%, respectively, from 2001. Concentrations of SO2, CO, and NO2 met the national standard. PM10 concentration exceeded the national standard by 22%.

According to current government monitoring and standards, PM10 is the biggest pollutant of concern presently in Beijing. In January of this year, I estimated 2008 annual PM10 at 0.123 mg/m3 (close enough to the actual reported figured of 0.122), noting that this is over six times higher than the WHO’s recommended ideal annual PM10 standard of 0.020 mg/m3.

As for the Olympics and Paralympics, Beijing’s State of the Environment Report presents individual graphs for Air Pollution Index for both periods, as if to prove that Beijing met its commitment to keep the API below 101 throughout the Games:

Related posts: final day of temporary air quality measures, end of the games.

Pollution concentration data are also shown, along with comparative reductions to 2007:

These numbers all support widespread claims that pollution during the Games was reduced by around 50% from 2007. Conclusion:

Translation:

Olympic Period Air Quality
Beijing’s air quality met the standard every day during the Olympics and Paralympics. The atmospheric concentrations of main pollutants were reduced by about 50% from last year. Daily concentrations of SO2, CO, and NO2 met world standards for developed cities, and the daily concentration of PM10 met the WHO Stage 3 guidelines, meeting Beijing’s promises by far.

I’ll be investigating that last sentence in a separate post.

Top image source: Page 1 of the report. All figures and tables copied from Beijing’s 2008 State of the Environment Report and then translated.

The article’s author, Michael Wines, portrays Beijing’s air quality situation from four different angles / contexts, all of which I think are important and valid for anyone wishing to understand the complexity of the air pollution issue. Here, I will describe and expand upon these four contexts.

1) Both the Beijing government and local researchers assert that air quality has steadily improved over the past decade. In other words, we’re making progress:

Through September, the government counted 221 days in which the 0-to-500 pollution index — the lower the number, the better — was below 101. It was the greatest number of “blue-sky days,” as the city calls them, since daily measurements were first published in 1998.

At the same time, the city has recorded only 2 days with dangerously high air pollution. That is the lowest number in a decade, and fully 17 days fewer than were logged in the same period in 2000.

…

“For those of us who have been monitoring air pollutants for about 10 years, we see a clear reduction in pollution,” Zhu Tong, a professor and air pollution scientist at Peking University’s College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, said in an interview.

2) Valid concerns exist over the accuracy and validity of the government data. In other words, be careful not to base all of your analysis on official statistics:

Outside experts caution that the city’s measurements are not just imprecise — they do not measure the tiniest particulates that are most damaging to lungs, for instance — but potentially misleading.

3) Although it appears that we are making progress, even the government’s official numbers show current air quality that is objectively still quite poor. In other words, we have a lot of work left to do:

And Beijing’s air remains far from pristine by any measure. The average concentration of particulates in city air during 2008, for example, was six times the ideal standard recommended by the World Health Organization. Indeed, Beijing has yet to meet the W.H.O.’s interim air standards for developing countries — or even the less stringent standards posted by China’s national government.

(Data supporting both of these claims may be found in these two posts from this blog: comparing international standards and summary of Beijing’s 2008 air quality.)

4) The improvements so far have been the result of impressive, massive, widespread programs and policies targeting air quality improvement; indeed such programs have been required for the government to have any chance in winning the “race” against the booming growth. In other words, although the government should be doing more, we recognize and applaud what they are already doing:

In the past decade, in fact, authorities have moved against air pollution problems with a tenacity that some environmentalists in developed nations, pitted against industry lobbyists and balky political machinery, can only envy.

The piece concludes by describing many such programs, including strict emission standards, fuel quality standards, introduction of alternative fuel buses, elimination of coal-fired burners, and more.

Rarely have I seen an article which succeeds at presenting all four perspectives. My general sense is that the Western media tends to focus largely on (2) and (3) (the data is suspect, air quality is still poor), whereas the Chinese media highlights (1) and (4) (we’re making progress, we have many successful programs in place). And yet, honest and comprehensive dialogue on solutions to Beijing’s air quality problem requires considering all four angles.

Lastly, my only objection to the article is the comparison of China’s scrappage program for high-emitting vehicles with the US’ Cash for Clunkers program. This is a little misleading, because the US program targets fuel economy while China’s program targets air pollutant emissions, but this is a subject for another post.

Disclosure: The author, Michael Wines, interviewed me for background information before writing the article.

This is very unusual for several reasons:

1) There should only be one API value for each day. Although I have occasionally noticed data points missing, I’ve never seen two different data points for the same day.

2) This double data point did not appear until months after the Olympics were over. I know this both because I was tracking the Olympic air quality data on a day-by-day basis last August, and also because I downloaded datasets earlier this year that did not include the double point.

3) There is a rather large discrepancy between the existing, reported 8/16/08 API, 23, and the new, second data point for the same day, 84. Given that 8/16/08 was right in the middle of the Olympics, if the second data point is indeed correct, it has implications for the overall air quality assessment of the Games.

My guess and hope is that it’s just some strange glitch in the data reporting system. I’ll continue to monitor it to see if anything changes.