In a sharp departure from the blue skies that typically glisten for Beijing’s landmark events, the start of this year’s parliamentary session has been marked by smog, with the annual meeting suffering its worst air quality in at least a decade.
(Bloomberg) — In a sharp departure from the blue skies that typically glisten for Beijing’s landmark events, the start of this year’s parliamentary session has been marked by smog, with the annual meeting suffering its worst air quality in at least a decade.
Levels of small particulates in the air jumped to 182 micrograms per cubic meter on Sunday as the National People’s Congress got underway, according to monitoring by the US Embassy. That’s well into the range considered unhealthy by medical experts and compares with an average level of less than 30 last year. The smog is palpable in the city of more than 20 million people, reducing visibility and causing people to cancel outdoor activities.
Beijing is no stranger to pollution, but such haze is rare at a major public event. For more than a decade, officials have employed so-called “blue skies” strategies around such dates, reducing nearby industrial activity ahead of time. Those efforts were taken this year, as steel mills in Tangshan 150 kilometers (93 miles) away began restricting output a week before the parliamentary session began.
It appears that, on this occasion, that proved to be too little, too late. Higher levels of activity at everything from steel mills to cement plants and diesel trucks in the past month — along with a convergence of meteorological factors like wind direction and warmth — have combined to trap bad air over Beijing, according to the National Joint Center for Air Pollution Prevention and Control. The conditions are expected to remain like this for 10 days, the center said in a statement on Sunday.
While Beijing, surrounded by mountains and at the edge of a desert, remains prone to bouts of smog, the city has made remarkable progress in recent years in cleaning the air by replacing coal with cleaner-burning natural gas, supporting electric vehicles and moving some heavy industry further away from population centers.
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