Air pollution needs urgent action

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This winter, the air quality over the north China plain has been record breaking - but not in a good way. From Jan 10 to16, the air quality in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region was so bad it was actually off the scale used to monitor air quality. The air pollution reached levels that the World Health Organization describes as hazardous and people were advised to stay indoors. On Thursday, heavy haze and smog descended over most of northern and eastern China again.

This highlights a key problem when it comes to environmental issues in this country - economic development takes precedence. The fundamental cause of the worsening air pollution is the mentality of economic growth at any cost, which has resulted in ever-worsening pollution and environmental degradation. In other words, even if unprecedented action is taken for treatment, there will be no cure as priority will still be given to newly launched projects.

And the priority given economic growth presents another problem, namely the failure of existing environmental protection policies and regulations to curb pollution. For instance, the current weak regulations covering emissions would suggest there has been a significant reduction in emissions when clearly this is not the case. Also those enterprises found breaking the regulations are still far lower than the cost of treating the pollution they produce. This means even if many large-scale enterprises with lagging production capacity fail to meet the requirements for environmental protection, the environmental protection department is incapable of shutting these enterprises down or forcing their relocation.

Dealing with air pollution requires taking action at the local level to reduce vehicle emissions and at the regional level to reduce industrial emissions. But it also requires giving more priority to environmental issues in policymaking. Our hope is that the environmental protection department will be truly capable of saying "no" to pollution, and it will raise standards and effectively enforce them, and that governments at all levels will prioritize quality of life not just economic growth.