A few days ago, China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection released its annual State of the Environment report. I was struck in particular by the following statistic: the air quality in 88.5% of China’s 113 “key environmental protection cities” meets China’s air quality standard. Sounds pretty good, right? Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with this number.

1) The first problem is that China’s current air quality standard, GB 3095-1996 (with revisions in 2000), is quite weak. Under this outdated standard, a city “in compliance” could still have an annual PM10 concentration as high as 100 µg/m^3 – a level 5 times higher than what’s recommended by the WHO. More importantly, the current standard doesn’t even include PM2.5 or ozone, the two ambient air pollutants of greatest long-term human health concern in urban megacities.

The good news is that last year, China adopted a new ambient air quality standard, GB 3095-2012. This new standard represents big progress in China by significantly tightening the acceptable limits for ambient air pollutant concentrations as well as adding standards for PM2.5 and ozone. Although the standard doesn’t enter into mandatory force until 2016, MEP’s 2012 annual report already reports compliance numbers according to the new standard. The numbers are bleak: just 23.9% of the 113 cities meet the new standard.

In other words, the introduction of the new standard causes the compliance rate of cities to drop from 88.5% to 23.9%. Although from a PR perspective this seems like a huge step backwards, I think MEP deserves tremendous credit for disclosing these data (and acknowledging the significant future challenges they imply).

continue reading Confusing numbers on ambient air quality compliance in China | International Council on Clean Transportation.