Switchboard, from NRDC › Alex Wang's Blog

Documentary on China's environment nominated for an Oscar

2011-02-01T02:39:24Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

Warriors of Qiugang, the excellent short documentary on China’s environment that I blogged about earlier this month, has been nominated for an Oscar.

As I mentioned in my previous post, this film is required viewing if you want to understand at a visceral level how local citizens are fighting to save the environment in China. If you have not seen it yet, the 39-minute film is available in full at the Yale e360 site.

Sam Geall at China Dialogue has a nice article about the film as well.

Congratulations to Ruby Yang and Tom Lennon!

The Warriors of Qiugang - A New Documentary on the Struggle to Save China's Environment

2011-01-11T05:15:22Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

A great deal has been written about the struggles to resolve China’s overwhelming environmental problems, but I have seen no better or more visceral portrayal of these issues than The Warriors of Qiugang, a short documentary film by Academy Award-winners Ruby Yang and Thomas Lennon that is being broadcast in full at the Yale e360 website beginning today. The film, shot over four years mostly in a village near the Huai River in eastern Anhui Province, captures a series of indelible scenes of the efforts of one village to stop pollution from local chemical factories that blackened rivers, killed fish, and sickened the local populace. The film portrays the deep complexities and challenges of obtaining justice and halting environmental degradation in rural China, but ultimately ends on a note of hope when the villagers succeed in having the main local polluter moved away to a nearby industrial park. The victory does not make up for the polluted farmland and illness caused, but it is a victory nonetheless. Moreover, it provides a glimpse at one of the paths that China has begun to take to turn its environmental crisis around: with local villagers willing to stand forward, the collaboration of local and Beijing-based environmental activists, journalists shining a light on local malfeasance, and a central Ministry of Environmental Protection beginning to utilize a range of new enforcement tools to put pressure on local polluters.

Over the last six years, we have worked with environmental lawyers, environmental groups, journalists, and government officials in China on ways to strengthen enforcement of environmental law, and the elements of the Qiugang story are familiar ones. A few observations:

The law both failed and saved Qiugang Village. Chinese environmental laws and regulations have proliferated over the past three decades, but have been criticized as ineffective. The film reinforces this view by portraying a legal system that fails local residents repeatedly over the course of years. Zhang Gongli - the leader of the villagers and a farmer with only a middle school education – brings several unsuccessful lawsuits despite seemingly clear violations of the law. Early lawsuits by others were met with retaliation and beatings from company thugs. Petitions sent to the local government are lost and met with no response. The failure of official channels to respond to the villagers’ complaints drives the villagers to take to the streets in protest and forces them to elevate their grievances to Beijing. Yet, despite these failures in the legal system, the ability of the villagers to ground their grievances in the law proved to be a powerful weapon. There is a memorable scene in the film in which a villager holding a tattered official copy of a 2004 speech on the environment by China’s President Hu Jintao points to a passage from the speech about the legal liability of officials who “connive to ruin and pollute the environment,” and says “President Hu Jintao’s own words! We’ve got Hu Jintao on our side. What are we afraid of?”[1] The villagers repeatedly cite to specific legal violations by the local factories. The law bolsters the legitimacy of the villagers’ grievances, even as they are forced to take extra-legal measures to have their grievances heard. The ability of the villagers to gain leverage by negotiating their grievances in the “shadow of the law” is an important development, and hopefully marks one positive step among many in the effort to create a stronger rule of law in China.

China’s fledgling green movement made a difference. China’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are sometimes thought of as weak and ineffectual. But, among the heroes of the film are the members of the local Anhui environmental group Green Anhui. Their work to investigate the pollution from local factories, educate villagers, and connect them with networks of environmental groups and media was a crucial catalyst to resolution of the problems in Qiugang. When 40 local elementary school students wrote essays to the local environmental protection bureau asking for help to stop the pollution from the local chemical plants, Green Anhui brought the essays to local newspapers. The news of these essays spread through the Internet, creating enough pressure that the local government ordered the polluting plants idled for a time. This is a good example of how even a small local grassroots environmental group can play a constructive role in solving environmental problems in China.

There is a great deal more in this film to appreciate and learn from. In a mere 39 minutes, the film presents the many layers of the current battle for the future of China’s environment and the health of its people. In the end, it is an optimistic story about how courage and sheer will can win out against overwhelming odds. However, imagine a thousand more Qiugang Villages around China and note the environmental problems - like the legacy of accumulated soil pollution - still unresolved, and you get a picture of how much work remains to be done before China can truly fix its environmental problems.

The Warriors of Qiugang is on the shortlist to receive a nomination for an Academy Award in the field of Documentary Short Subject.

The full video of film can be found here.

[1] A speech is, of course, not technically “law,” but remarks from China’s most senior leaders can have an important impact on the understanding of the law.

Progress and Retreat for Environmental Transparency in China: Announcing the 2009-10 Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI) Results

2010-12-31T05:10:57Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

Environmental transparency in China showed both progress and retreat over the past year, and many implementation challenges still remain.

This was one of the overall findings of the second annual Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI), which the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) and NRDC launched in Beijing earlier this week. PITI is an assessment and ranking of environmental transparency in 113 cities commenced by IPE and NRDC in 2009.

This year’s PITI launch included for the first time participation from local Chinese environmental officials. Representatives from Ningbo (the top ranked city in the PITI ranking), Chongqing (the top ranked city from western China), and Huangshi, Hubei Province spoke at the launch about the practical challenges of complying with China’s information disclosure rules. This level of open engagement between Chinese government officials and environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is a positive sign for the development of greater transparency in China in the years to come.

Mr. Tang Yuanpeng of the Huangshi environmental protection bureau raised the benefits of such exchange explicitly in discussing an IPE- and NRDC-sponsored meeting in May 2010 where more than 50 Chinese government officials met with NGOs and academics to discuss the first PITI results: “I was very inspired, especially by the idea that environmental open information is a way to increase public right to know, and reconcile differences between the public, enterprises, and the government. This gave us much impetus to improve, so after we returned to Huangshi we renovated our existing environmental protection website to strengthen its ability to disclose information and its user friendliness.”

2009-10 PITI Results:

The Chinese version of the second PITI report is available now, and we plan to release an English version of the report in January. Stay tuned. In the meantime, here are a number of the key findings from this year’s report:

Although average information disclosure performance remained low, the overall level of environmental transparency in China improved.

This year’s PITI evaluation found that overall environmental information disclosure performance remained low, with an average score of 36 out of 100 possible points for all 113 cities evaluated.[1] Nonetheless, the average score increased by five points. Eighty-two cities (73 percent) received a higher score than last year.

Improved performance of the “All-Star” team shows that good information disclosure is possible in China right now.

By combining the top-scoring city in each of the eight evaluated information disclosure categories, we created a hypothetical team of “All-Star” cities for information disclosure. The All-Star team scored 89.5 out of 100 points last year, showing that in each category of information disclosure China already had cities performing relatively well. This year, the All-Star team’s overall score increased by 5.8 points to 95.3, which is close to the maximum points possible under PITI. Once again, this highlights the fact that Chinese cities are already capable of good government information disclosure. The data proves wrong those cities that claim China’s current level of development does not provide the resources or capacity to implement good environmental transparency.

A few other findings of note:

Response to public information requests improved modestly, with 49 of 113 cities responding to information requests this year, compared to 44 in the 2008 PITI evaluation.
Progress on transparency was uneven and regional disparities have widened. The most progress was seen in eastern and southern coastal regions, which widened the gap with the central and western cities.
In the run-up to the hosting of major events, a number of cities improved their environmental transparency. This included Beijing (2008 Summer Olympics), Jinan in Shandong Province (2009 National Games), Shanghai (2010 World Expo), and Guangzhou (2010 Asian Games). In Beijing, these practices were not sustained after the Olympics. Whether these practices will be maintained in these other cities remains to be seen.
Many provincial capitals performed poorly in absolute terms and relative to other cities within their provinces. This is a surprising result given the superior financial, policy, and human resources typically found in Chinese capital cities. Five capital cities scored in the 20 point range. Eleven capital cities were not the top performers in their province, and a few capitals (such as Hangzhou and Shijiazhuang) performed quite poorly in their provinces.

The complete PITI report contains a great deal more analysis of trends and comparisons among regions, cities, and provinces. The Chinese version of the report can be found here.

An Annual Review of China’s Environmental Transparency:

This year’s PITI report also includes a new feature – a review of general developments in Chinese environmental transparency over the last year. Overall environmental transparency in China, like with the 113 cities in our PITI evaluation, showed both progress and retreat. A few specific points:

Central-level ministries made positive steps forward on environmental transparency this year.

China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) began to disclose substantial documents for environmental inspections related to company refinancing. In October 2010, MEP disclosed a more than 300-page document with information about more than 100 Sinopec subsidiaries. The document contained emissions data for certain pollutants from 2007 to 2009 and a range of other environmental information. Since October 2010, MEP has released similar documents in connection with 14 other company refinancings. We hope to see this sort of disclosure for a much broader range of companies in the future. Various ministries also began to disclose information related to enterprise energy efficiency performance. In May 2010, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) provided disclosure related to the performance of China’s “Top-1,000” energy-consuming enterprises against allocated energy intensity reduction targets. In June 2010, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) disclosed a list of 2,087 industrial facilities from 18 industries with technology required to be taken out of operation. For the MIIT disclosure, media reports quickly pointed out that a number of the pieces of equipment listed did not exist or had been taken out of operation long ago. We view this as a reason for continued disclosure, since public scrutiny of this sort of government information will tend to make it more accurate and reliable in the future.

The Zijin Mining Group accident highlighted the need for more facility-level emissions disclosure.

The disclosure of environmental information in China still faces inordinate challenges. The July 2010 Zijin Mining Group chemical spill was a prime example. The accident killed nearly 2000 tons of fish, and Zijin’s nine-day delay in reporting the accident was a stark reminder of the inadequacy of public company information disclosure and public awareness of environmental risks. A variety of stakeholders, including NGOs, stock exchanges and environmental officials, proposed technical measures to address this problem, but the larger question is whether the Zijin incident will be China’s “Minamata moment” and lead to transformative changes in disclosure of the hidden environmental risks lurking behind companies like Zijin. To date, we have not yet seen serious proposals for this sort of game-changing action.

The public has faced some difficulties in satisfying information requests and obtaining relief in court.

We have seen a number of cases of citizens having difficulty in obtaining environmental information through government information requests. Southern Weekend (a leading Chinese newspaper), a Friends of Nature-affiliated group, Greenpeace and others all publicized difficulties in obtaining environmental information through public information requests. This is consistent with the findings of our PITI evaluation. Moreover, anecdotal evidence suggests that appeals to the courts regarding information request denials have faced some difficulty as well. Lack of standing to request information has been the grounds in several cases. Details of several cases are discussed in this year’s PITI report. How government agencies and courts handle these open information disclosure matters in the coming few years will have a major impact on level of public trust in China’s open government information system.

The next step for China: facility-level disclosure of pollutant releases

Most importantly, disclosure of information regarding factory-level pollutant releases is still fairly limited in China. Chinese environmental regulations only require disclosure of such emissions/discharge data for a limited number of black-listed companies, and in practice it has been difficult to get even these companies to disclose the amount of pollution they release into the environment. It is well-known in China and abroad that open disclosure of enterprise pollutant release data is critical to effective environmental management. Such disclosure has been shown time and again in countries around the world to reduce pollution by motivating companies, enhancing public monitoring and supervision, and strengthening the government’s ability to prioritize and target enforcement efforts.

General public disclosure of enterprise-level pollutant release data, such as through the creation of a pollutant release and transfer register (i.e., a pollutant release database), is a natural next step for China.

The environmental official from Chongqing who spoke at the PITI launch this week noted that a great deal of useful environmental information is gathered under China’s clean production audit rules and other Chinese legal requirements, so it would not be technically difficult to take the next step to disclose this information to the public. Such an effort would go a long way in helping to strengthen environmental management and reduce pollution in China.

Media Coverage of the PITI Launch:

CCTV China News Program 《中国新闻栏目》 (PITI coverage from 9:51 to 11:02)

Ningbo tops pollution transparency list (Global Times环球时报英文版)

Cities stay tightlipped over pollution data - South China Morning Post香港南华早报 [behind pay wall]

A ranking of environmental open information in 113 Chinese cities: Beijing fails to pass（中国113城市环境信息公开排名:北京不及格）- China Daily中国日报 (Chinese)

Only ten percent of cities receive a passing grade for pollution information disclosure（污染源信息公开水平及格城市仅1成）- Caijing财经 (Chinese)

Environmental open information – between progress and retreat（环境信息公开进退之间）- China.com.cn 中国网 (Chinese)

[1] Under the PITI framework, slightly more than 60 points represent information disclosure obligations under the law and nearly 40 points represent actions that are encouraged by Chinese policy or otherwise improve public user convenience. A score in excess of 60 points is deemed a “passing” grade under PITI.

Farewell to Liang Congjie, founder of China's first environmental NGO

2010-11-04T01:00:50Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

This blog is co-authored with Barbara Finamore.

This past week Liang Congjie, one of the founders of Friends of Nature (FON) and the godfather of China’s environmental movement, passed away. The establishment in 1994 of FON, China’s first legally registered environmental group, paved the way for the creation of more than 3,000 registered, and many more unregistered, environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China today.

On Tuesday morning, there was a simple farewell ceremony for Mr. Liang at Shijitan Hospital on the west side of Beijing. By FON’s informal count, more than a thousand people arrived to pay their respects. Many more sent messages in remembrance from all around China. The messages on white strips of paper, many hand-written with brush and ink, hung in long rows along the walkway to the memorial. It seemed as if Beijing’s entire environmental community had come.

This community of people who have devoted their lives to protecting China’s environment is Mr. Liang’s lasting legacy. Fifteen years ago this community did not exist, except in a loose, unorganized way. Today, thousands of environmental groups work on an incredible array of environmental problems that reflect the serious nature of the environmental crisis in China, as well as the greater space to work on environmental issues that Mr. Liang helped to forge.

Friends of Nature is still in the vanguard, one of the few environmental groups with true national name recognition. In addition to their traditional environmental education work, FON has moved toward more sophisticated policy and community activism, including helping communities to deal with environmental justice issues surrounding waste incinerators, advocating for greater transparency of listed companies in China, and setting up a rapid response team to review environmental impact assessments of major polluting projects. These days they publish an annual “Greenbook” on China’s environment, the definitive account of the top issues in China’s environment each year. Moreover, FON has come to play a critical role in reaching out and serving as a resource to communities around the country, often where FON volunteer groups have formed. They do all this with the humility that was Mr. Liang’s hallmark. FON staff still prints its business cards on the back of used printing paper, and they have kept their offices simple and their limited resources focused on the work.

But in addition to FON, there are now a surprising number of environmental groups around China (many of which we have had the privilege to work with) that have developed effective approaches and continue to battle against unbelievable odds to improve China’s environment. These include Ma Jun’s Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs, Jin Jiaman’s Global Environmental Institute, Wang Yongchen’s Green Earth Volunteers, and countless others. Among these are important community-based or local-level groups that are doing terrific work, such as Yun Jianli’s Green Hanjiang, Huo Daishan’s Huai River Defenders, Wu Dengming’s Green Volunteer League of Chongqing, and nimble, more fledgling groups like Green Anhui in Anhui Province and Green Camelbell in Gansu Province. These groups work on difficult domestic issues, and, as we saw in the recent Tianjin climate meetings, have begun to assert themselves on the international stage.

Nonetheless, China’s environmental NGOs still face difficult odds some fifteen years after Mr. Liang launched FON. Antiquated government rules still limit fundraising, membership, and the range of activities. Onerous and unclear registration requirements limit groups’ independence. Environmental groups have always had the most room to operate in China among NGOs, but it says something that FON still has only 20 staff as it nears the end of its teenage years.

But the vibrant environmental community that was on full display at the farewell ceremony this week is, I believe, here to stay. And the movement that Mr. Liang helped to spark will only get stronger.

NRDC’s China Program Director, Barbara Finamore, recalls having dinner with Mr. Liang back in 1993, when he described his vision for creating China’s first independent environmental organization – a seemingly impossible task at the time. Mr. Liang knew it would be an uphill battle, and that the most he could hope for at first was approval to conduct some limited environmental education activities. But he thought it was important to use whatever political capital he had to start somewhere.

We all thank Mr. Liang for acting on his vision then, and starting a movement that lives on today.

Links:

Friends of Nature’s website (where many essays, comments, photos, and other tributes to Mr. Liang are posted)

Liang Congjie: The Godfather of China's Green Movement (The Atlantic)

Liang Congjie, Chinese Environmental Pioneer, Dies at 78 (New York Times)

The passing of Liang Congjie, China’s environmental and civil society pioneer (NGOs in China blog)

What to make of China's efforts to meet its energy intensity targets

2010-10-21T22:37:34Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

Adam Moser at Vermont Law School’s China Environmental Governance blog drew a contrast between a blog post of mine discussing China’s efforts to meet its energy targets, and a post by Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations positing the view that China’s energy statistics “have become pretty meaningless.” Mr. Moser frames our posts as being on opposite sides of the argument (“circus or savior”), but it is perhaps more accurate to say that we are looking at different aspects of the same picture.

There are really two key questions being addressed here.

First, what is China doing to address its contribution to global climate change?
Second, are these efforts achieving the reported levels of success?

I focus primarily on the first question. Mr. Levi on the second.

What is China doing?

I won’t rehash my post here, but my point was simply to point out a fact that many outside have failed to appreciate: while national climate legislation in the U.S. has languished, China has over the last five years been putting in place the framework for a massive, national effort to reduce energy intensity. A lot of attention has been paid to China’s moves on renewable energy and clean energy technologies, but less has been said about this very fundamental change in governance. China has made its 20 percent energy intensity and 10 percent pollution reduction targets national targets of the highest priority and has said that government officials and managers in state-owned facilities will face serious consequences for failing to meet the targets. Moreover, China has already announced that it will rely on this system to achieve its announced 40 to 45 percent carbon intensity reduction target by 2020. Earlier this week, a Chinese official said that China will seek to achieve a 17.3 percent reduction in its energy intensity for the 12th Five-Year Plan (FYP) period (2011-15), and a 16.6 percent reduction for the 13th FYP period (2016-20).

The pressure to meet the target has driven a great deal of action, particularly this year, the final year before accounts are settled for the 11th FYP. The effort has revolved around the shut-down of outdated capacity, differential pricing policies, limits to “high energy intensity, high pollution” projects, an increase in inspections to enforce energy efficiency standards, and so on (Chinese).* There has also been a greater level of transparency (at least at the macro level) about performance against targets (Chinese). Here is a selected list of announcements:

NDRC has invested over 200 billion yuan in energy efficiency and pollution reduction measures and projects in the 11th FYP period (Chinese).
Jiangsu Province announced shut down of “outdated capacity” in 142 companies (Chinese), and has implemented punitive pricing for excessive energy consumption (Chinese).
Guangxi Autonomous Region announced it had met its targets for retiring outdated capacity: 644 MW of power generation capacity, 2 million tons of steel production capacity, 4.464 million tons of cement production capacity, 112,300 tons of paper production capacity, and 21,000 tons of iron alloy production capacity (Chinese).
Inner Mongolia triggered a contingency plan to limit production in certain high-energy using industries and a variety of other measures (Chinese).
Shandong Province has taken emergency action against 773 energy-intensive enterprises to achieve its energy intensity target (Chinese).

Some of the more recent and extreme actions to reduce energy consumption (e.g., intentional citywide blackouts) don’t represent sustainable energy conservation policies, but can be explained by the extreme pressure that local governments are under to meet their energy intensity reduction targets by the end of this year. In Anping County in Hebei Province, for example, the local government cut off power to hospitals and streetlights in an attempt to meet its energy saving targets. Strict targets often lead to this kind of gaming and to unintended behaviors and outcomes. Indeed, there is a rich body of academic literature that addresses the kinds of governance challenges that arise in implementing China’s target responsibility systems (see for example, here, here, and here). The central government has responded to these draconian measures and told local and provincial level leaders that such unsustainable and heavy-handed measures are not permissible (Chinese). As China continues to rely heavily on the target responsibility system to achieve its energy efficiency and emissions reduction goals, continued vigilance needs to be paid to preventing this sort of gaming and instead encouraging long-term investments and incentives for energy efficiency in industry and buildings.

Are China’s actions working?

If we believe the announced numbers, China has made a substantial reduction in its energy intensity over the last four years, reducing energy intensity by 15.61 percent over 2005 levels by the end of 2009. One question is how much of this is due to long-term improvements in efficiency vs. short-term gaming. The question Mr. Levi raises is whether we can believe the energy intensity numbers that China reports at all [his colleague at the Council on Foreign Relations, Elizabeth Economy, also raises the equally critical question of what the U.S. is doing in this regard].

We know that overly strict targets can lead to falsification of data. If you have watched The Wire or read this article about manipulation of crime statistics in New York City, you get a sense of the perverse incentives and possibilities for data falsification that an extreme focus on achieving targets can create even in the U.S. But is Chinese data as “meaningless” as Mr. Levi suggests? It is hard to argue that China’s energy intensity and energy efficiency have not improved through the numerous energy efficiency programs that China’s government has implemented over the last four years, like the Top 1000 Enterprises program, small plant closures, etc. (see this Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory assessment for an excellent review of China’s efficiency programs in the 11th Five Year Plan.) However, it is also true that people in and out of China have reason to be uncertain about the energy data that China reports.

Away from the politically-charged atmosphere of the climate negotiations, there is a great deal of technical and policy work going on in China to improve monitoring of energy consumption and emissions and data quality. My colleague Barbara Finamore recently wrote about some of China’s domestic efforts. From our vantage point on-the-ground here in China, we are aware of the serious work that China is doing to improve energy efficiency and reduce pollution, and the efforts to improve measurement, monitoring and reporting in these areas. We also know that thought is being put into how to deal with the challenges of implementing China’s energy and environmental targets.

The best thing China can do at this stage is to continue to strengthen its efforts to build internal capacity for monitoring and assurance of data quality, and to share this information openly in China and on the international stage. This won’t be any easy task, but by doing so China will strengthen its ability to measure its progress in achieving its own domestic climate change objectives, get recognition for its efforts abroad, and take a leadership role in the global battle to solve climate change.

* Many of the sources hyperlinked in this post are Chinese-language only. For English-only readers, go to translate.google.com for a somewhat workable automatic translation.

China Looks to the U.S. to Learn From the Clean Air Act, Even as Some in the U.S. Seek to Dismantle It.

2010-10-19T01:30:07Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

It is remarkable that the U.S. Clean Air Act is under attack these days. Have we come to take the blue skies in the U.S. so for granted that magazines are running columns with titles like “Clean Air Act: Defend or Dismantle?” I have worked for NRDC in Beijing for the last five years, and no one in this great city takes a blue sky day for granted. They are too precious and rare a commodity.

Let us not forget, as Peter Lehner recently pointed out, that the Clean Air Act is what prevents the air in the U.S. from looking like Beijing’s. If you need a reminder of what bad air pollution looks like, here is a picture I took a few years ago that gives a sense of the challenge.

This is why NRDC is engaging in an all-out effort to defend the U.S. Clean Air Act from attack. And it is also why we are working in China to strengthen the environmental laws and enforcement mechanisms needed to tackle China’s serious air pollution.

So, it is ironic that, even as we battle to defend the Clean Air Act, China is seeking help from the U.S. EPA to learn about the very air regulation techniques that most Republicans and some coal-state Democrats are trying to dismantle. Last week, I attended the 6th Annual Regional Air Quality Management Conference in Beijing, organized by China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) and the EPA. The event marked the renewal of a memorandum of understanding between MEP and EPA on air pollution, toxics, enforcement, water pollution, and waste. China’s environmental minister Zhou Shengxian and U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson spoke at the meeting.

Notably, the conference also provided some insight into the direction China will take on air pollution in its upcoming 12th Five-Year Plan. China will focus its air pollution efforts in four areas [N.B.: the following is a rough translation from Zhou’s remarks; it’s dense, but worth reading to get a picture of where China wants to go on air pollution regulation]:

1. Enhance the level of main pollutants total emission control:

Continue to reduce SO2 and COD (the current two “pollution reduction” five-year plan targets);
Add NOx and ammonia to the total emission target program that has been the core of China’s pollution reduction effort in the 11th Five-Year Plan period;
Increase SO2 reduction in coal-fired power generation, steel, petrochemical, non-ferrous metals, and other industries; completing the pollution levy program for SO2 emissions; and strengthening power plant denitrification;
Improve motor vehicle pollution control, strictly implementing national motor vehicle emissions standards, and accelerating the development of cleaner motor vehicle fuel.

2. Accelerate progress in building regional joint prevention and control:

Combine local governance and regional control; coordinating pilot efforts and comprehensive system reform; seeking breakthroughs in key regions first;
Focus on the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei key regions, establish regional air quality prevention and control programs with integrated planning, monitoring, supervision, assessment, and coordination.

3. Reinforce comprehensive air pollution control:

Improve regional industrial structure and distribution; implementing special emissions limits for key industry; tightening the environmental threshold for project approvals;
Promote use of clean energy; improving the structure of municipal energy consumption; and increasing the proportion of clean energy used;
Develop integrated multi-pollutant control approaches for PM, VOC, mercury emission, ozone, etc.

4. Improve regional air quality monitoring and supervision:

Strengthen air quality monitoring in key regions; develop monitoring of acid rain, PM2.5, ozone, and air quality along urban roadways;
Improve the air quality indicator system; establish air quality evaluation methodologies for ozone and PM2.5;
Build regional environmental enforcement and supervision, increase rectification of illegal corporate polluters;
Strengthen urban air quality rating, to assure to meet the air quality improvement goals in time.

Our team in Beijing has been working with MEP and other Chinese government entities to find ways to strengthen air pollution regulation in China. The Chinese experts are serious people working on important problems under difficult circumstances. Chinese officials are looking to the U.S. experience, more than that of any other country, in search of the best regulatory and governance “technologies” to solve their air pollution problems. It is a shame that some in the U.S. are seeking to discard what the rest of the world views as state-of-the-art approaches to a cleaner, more sustainable model of development. Let’s make sure that they do not succeed.

Announcing the Release of the Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI) in English

2010-10-12T07:56:50Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

We are pleased to release the English version of our 2008-09 Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI), a collaboration between the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). As you may recall, PITI is an evaluation and ranking of environmental transparency in 113 Chinese cities. We released these results (in Chinese) last summer and the response has been very positive.

At the end of last year, we learned that China Economic Times, an influential national Chinese newspaper, selected PITI as one of the top ten environmental events of 2009, saying:

[PITI] can be called a model of non-governmental organizations playing their role of supervising government. Here, NGOs have not simply relied on passion and a spirit of protecting environmental interests, but have drawn from the power of expertise, and used legal channels and dialogue with the government. Perhaps there are local governments that do not know much about these two organizations, but the scientific-nature and rigor of the evaluation system make it impossible for government officials to ignore these results. Therein lies progress.

Of course, what matters is whether all of this work and attention is helping to expand environmental transparency and improve environmental quality in China. We have seen the cities themselves beginning to pay attention. In May 2010, IPE and NRDC worked with Environmental Protection Magazine to sponsor a workshop in Weihai, Shandong Province for more than 50 government officials to discuss ways to improve environmental transparency. Lanzhou, one of the low scorers in the 2008-09 evaluation, came to the conference to unveil a new online environmental information platform. A number of cities talked openly about the challenges of improving environmental information disclosure. More recently, a number of cities have referenced PITI in their open information annual reports. For example, Zhengzhou Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau’s annual open information report noted Zhengzhou’s (positive) performance on the PITI evaluation in responding to public information requests. The Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area also raised PITI in its annual open information report.

More importantly, our preliminary results for the 2009-10 PITI evaluation show that government offices have been more responsive to environmental information requests.

Nonetheless, there is clearly still a long way to go. Many cities are still not adhering to the open information regulations and disclosing basic environmental information as required by Chinese law. The Legal Daily reported in June 2010 that, after two years of implementation of China’s open information regulations, environmental disclosure still faced many obstacles. A government official from Hebei Province cited in the article noted that some government officials fear that disclosure will cause collective incidents or petitions, or still adhere to the outdated view that the public need not have access to government information. Another leading Chinese newspaper, Southern Weekend, sent out twenty-nine information requests to provincial-level environmental protection bureaus (EPBs) seeking lists of enterprises that had been issued administrative fines for environmental violations. While twelve EPBs responded to the requests, the other EPBs were not so cooperative: thirteen remained silent, three refused to reply and one attached conditions to disclosure. Environmental groups that have made requests for environmental information have similarly reported challenges in obtaining information that is commonly disclosed in other countries.

What’s Next?

We will be releasing our 2009-10 PITI evaluation results in the next few months, which will give us a clearer sense of whether or not there has been progress in China’s environmental transparency over the last year. We hope that this information will serve as a basis for others to conduct their own research and help to bring about greater environmental transparency. Professors at University of California at Berkeley and Yale have already done some very interesting preliminary analysis into the factors that correlate with PITI ranking. They found that:

First, the financial strength of a city’s government is a crucial determinant of transparency. Establishing the institutions to collect, organize, and disseminate information is costly and remains a low priority for cash-strapped local governments. Secondly,... [c]ities whose economies are relatively dependent on a single industrial firm tend to resist implementing transparency requirements when compared to those dealing with a less concentrated industrial base.

We at IPE and NRDC firmly believe that environmental transparency is the foundation of strong environmental protection. There is still much to do. We need to find solutions to improving transparency. The collaborative work by others has helped point the way toward answers (better funding, countering the excessive influence of local enterprise interests, etc.). We need to better understand what effect transparency has on environmental quality in China. We are looking forward to continuing work with Chinese cities and other stakeholders to find the most effective ways forward.

Related Links:

In August of last year, Ma Jun, IPE’s founder, and I went on CCTV-9’s Dialogue to talk about the PITI evaluation.
NRDC released a fact sheet in November 2009 discussing the connection between PITI results and climate change.
PITI was featured in Friends of Nature’s annual Green Book on China’s environment.

China: Racing Toward the Finish Line on its Energy and Environmental Targets

2010-10-07T12:09:14Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

I am in Tianjin this week for the climate talks, and the mood, compared to Copenhagen, has been subdued. In contrast, all around China government officials and factory owners are working themselves into a frenzy to meet their share of China’s 20 percent energy intensity reduction target.

The headlines have been stunning. Across the country, a massive effort has been mobilized to eliminate backwards production capacity, control growth in energy intensive industries (like steel and cement), and a variety of other efforts. In August, China released a list of over 2,000 factories with outdated equipment that had to be shut down by the end of September. Anping County in Hebei Province cut power to hospitals, schools and homes for 10 days in an effort to save energy. The process has not been polished in all respects. And reactions, like the forced blackouts, are clearly unintended outcomes. But, China’s process is no doubt rushing forward at breakneck pace on an unprecedented scale. And, despite the unintended consequences, it is hard to argue that this is not a serious effort that is having significant impact.

What is going on here?

If you have been following China’s climate and environment efforts, you know that China instituted two major environmental targets in the current 2006-2010 11th Five-Year Plan: the 20 percent energy intensity target, and a 10 percent pollution reduction target. What you may not know is that this marked an unprecedented elevation of environmental and energy targets in China. While China had started to experiment with evaluating government officials and factory owners on the basis of environmental criteria in the 1990s on a pilot basis, in 2006, China for the first time designated its environmental and energy targets as so-called veto targets, the highest level government targets previously reserved for factors such as GDP growth and few other targets. In theory, this means that government officials who do not meet these targets will lose their jobs, receive no bonuses and face other consequences.

To outside observers, this “target responsibility system” may seem quite unfamiliar as a governance tool. It is more commonly found, say, in the management of large corporations. Think of GE issuing profit targets to its business units and basing promotion and bonus decisions on this performance. China has already announced that this is the system it will have at the core of its efforts to implement its carbon intensity targets in the 12th Five-Year Plan and onward.

These governance systems with Chinese characteristics clearly motivate behavior.

Over the last four plus years, China has embarked on a massive effort to establish a governance framework to implement its jieneng jianpai (节能减排energy efficiency, pollution reduction) targets. This has included a detailed series of regulations, and a variety of other mechanisms (see here for more information). The result has been that, as of the end of 2009, China had reduced its energy intensity by 15.61% from 2005 levels. However, in the first quarter of 2010, energy intensity rose (by 3.2 percent) for the first time since 2006. In response, in May 2010, China’s Premier Wen Jiabao announced that China would redouble its efforts to reduce its energy intensity with an “iron hand” (Green Leap Forward has a nice blog on this).

In the wake of this announcement, we have seen some unintended consequences (see here). But China’s NDRC has reacted quickly by setting forth clearer rules (English version) on how to implement the energy and environment targets, including banning forced blackouts. Expect continued efforts to work out these kinks as China heads into the 12th Five-Year plan and begins to implement its carbon intensity target. China also has an opportunity here to show the world its good work, as my colleague Barbara Finamore notes.

Stay tuned for what happens over the next five or six months in China as we head toward the end of the 11th Five-Year Plan and accounts are settled across the country. It’s going to be a wild finish.

Huo Daishan recipient of 2010 Ramon Magsaysay Award

2010-08-17T06:54:18Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

NRDC would like to congratulate our partner Huo Daishan for being named as one of the recipients of the 2010 Ramon Magsaysay Award, known to many as Asia’s Nobel Prize. Mr. Huo has been a passionate advocate for the Huai River, China’s third largest and most polluted river, since the 1980s. Initially, he documented the pollution of the river as a photographer. In 1998, he began doing this as a full-time job and in 2000 he formed the organization Huai River Guardians. The many accomplishments of the organization include monitoring and testing water quality, pushing companies to implement pollution-control measures, raising environmental awareness, and aiding desperate citizens affected by water pollution. This is difficult, often thankless work that is absolutely essential to the survival of China's environment, and we applaud Mr. Huo.

Mr. Huo will receive his award in Manila, Philippines on August 31, 2010.

See here for an old Greenlaw post about Mr. Huo’s work.

The Magsaysay Awardees Resource Center has a series of links to articles about Mr. Huo.

The Rivers Run Red: what can we learn from the recent spate of environmental accidents in China?

2010-08-03T07:08:14Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

It has been a horrible month for China’s environment. Last week while workers in northeast China pulled more than 3,000 barrels - each containing 170 kilograms (374 lbs.) of flammable chemicals - out of the Songhua River, a plastics factory in Nanjing burned, China’s largest-ever oil spill engulfed the waters of Dalian, and acid overflowing a mine poisoned the Ting River in the southern province of Fujian, killing nearly two million kilograms of fish and putting local populations at severe risk. It has not been any better in the U.S., as the BP oil spill worked through its fourth month, a Michigan pipeline spilled more than 840,000 gallons of oil, and U.S. climate legislation collapsed (for now) in a cloud of recriminations.

Many policymakers and environmentalists are seeing the current spate of environmental disasters as only the latest sign that the chickens are finally coming home to roost for China’s environment. These and the series of heavy metal poisonings of more than 4,000 people last year are the predictable consequence of three decades of unsustainable development. These accidents strongly support the notion that, as China’s senior leadership has already stated, China must change its development model to a more sustainable one. They also point to the urgent need to lay an effective foundation for environmental transparency and stronger enforcement in China.

China’s “Minamata Moment?”

Will the current round of environmental disasters trigger China’s “Minamata moment,” driving real reforms that put an end to China’s environmental decline? Too often these environmental “incidents” have been viewed by some as just the cost of China’s economic rise. China needs to focus on economic development now, the argument goes, and will naturally be able to do more on the environment once it has become a wealthier country. This viewpoint has been surprisingly durable, even as China is beset by environmental disasters on all sides. But the argument has become increasingly difficult to sustain as the costs of China’s environmental degradation mount.

Lessons Learned

Two particular aspects of these accidents have not received adequate attention in the public debate and the media.

You can only solve the problems you know about

One of the more egregious aspects of the July 3rd Zijin Mining accident in Shanghang County, Fujian Province was the failure of Zijin to report its massive acid spill for nine days. The failure to disclose such a dangerous spill put lives at risk, exacerbated losses to local fishermen, and cost investors dearly. This was only the latest in more than a decade of accidents and cover-ups for Zijin. This is also indicative of broader problems in China with environmental information disclosure. Data on factory emissions of pollutants are still largely unavailable to the public and companies are not required to publicly disclose the types and amounts of dangerous chemicals they store and use on premises.

Two weeks ago, 11 Chinese environmental groups called for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Stock Exchanges to investigate Zijin for its information disclosure practices (NRDC has also supported this call) and it is good to see that the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) is investigating Zijin’s nine-day delay in going public. We have seen positive trends in disclosure from China’s central-level environmental regulators. Earlier this year, MEP announced perhaps for the first time in its history that China’s environment overall was getting worse, not better. Moreover, it revised its 2007 water pollution numbers to show that water pollution for that year was 2.5 times worse than previously announced.[1] This trend towards disclosing the true state of affairs is a very good sign, since acknowledgment of a problem is the first step to recovery. Nonetheless, the tendency to hide bad news is still strong. Many enterprises and cities in China still are not disclosing pollution information at the level required by Chinese law. Moreover, too frequent revision of past data will decrease public trust in Chinese data overall.

MEP has for several years been a leader among Chinese ministries in promoting greater transparency. However, Chinese environmental disclosure requirements still require less disclosure than is seen in many other countries. For example, the vast majority of Chinese enterprises are not required to publicly disclose their pollutant emissions or their use and storage of toxic chemicals, no matter how potentially harmful to the public. The Zijin Mining incident presents an opportunity to step up disclosure requirements with an aim to deterring violations, protecting public health and bringing Chinese requirements into line with those of peer countries.

Social stability comes from fixing the problem

If you followed the sordid Zijin saga closely last month, you also saw a noteworthy bit of back-tracking from the company. Zijin initially took the indefensible position that “the lack of a prompt announcement about the accident was for the purpose of maintaining stability, as to not arouse the local people’s panic and fear.”[2] In other words, Zijin wanted us to believe that it failed to disclose its accident, not to hide its own malfeasance, but rather to protect the public. A week later, Zijin admitted that the accident had been caused by weak management and inadequate emergency procedures, and that "the mishandling of the release of public information has led to financial loss for downstream fish farmers and harmful social consequences." This exploded the myth, held by too many local enterprises and not a few officials, that stability can be enhanced by hiding the truth from Chinese citizens, higher-level government authorities, and the international investment community. The Zijin incident laid bare how the goal of “social stability” could be used as a excuse to cover-up malfeasance. But what is now clear is that China’s environmental challenges are far too great to be hidden from view. As Ma Jun, one of China’s leading environmentalists, has said, “[i]f China doesn't address the environmental issues when the economy is growing fast, it might become a destabilizing factor in the society.”

The most effective way to maintain social stability - a top Chinese priority - is actually to solve the environmental problems that are now costing China so dearly. And the solution to these environmental challenges must include real consequences for those responsible. This starts with real environmental transparency, and includes stronger penalties for violations that take away the economic benefit companies gain by flouting environmental laws. Furthermore, environmental officials must be granted more resources both to carry out enforcement and to help companies learn how to comply with the law. Multi-national companies that purchase products from Chinese companies can also play an important role in ensuring that the local companies they do business with are not violating China’s environmental laws. In cases, like with Zijin, where a company is seeking global capital on international stock exchanges, there must be an even higher level of accountability, and the stock exchanges, securities regulators, purchasers and the international investment community can all play a role in making sure that “business as usual” no longer involves poisoning China and its people.

We have seen some heads begin to roll in the Zijin case, but this is only a start. Over the last year, China has rightfully received credit for taking a leadership role in the search for clean energy. In this area, China has mobilized massive resources and policy support to work towards achieving ambitious energy and renewable energy targets. Let’s hope that the recent spate of environmental incidents truly does become a “Minamata moment” that leads to the same kind of decisive change that will make China a leader in environmental protection.

Thanks to Jane Li for research assistance for this post.

[1] Complete results of the MEP national pollution census from which this water pollution data was drawn have not been publicly disclosed as of this writing.

[2] Zijin Mining Group Executive Said Delayed Information Disclosure Was for Maintaining Stability; Feared Disclosure Might Arouse Panic and Fear, China Youth On Line-China Youth Daily, July 15, 2010. 紫金矿业高管称为维稳迟报事故信息担心引恐慌，中青在线-中国青年报，2010-07-15

Assessing the State of Environmental Transparency in China

2010-06-07T13:25:40Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

I was in Weihai (en), a 2.5 million person city in eastern Shandong Province, last month to talk about environmental transparency with more than 50 government officials and scholars from around China. As far as I am aware, this is the largest gathering to date of Chinese government officials focused on implementation of China’s Open Government Information Regulations and Open Environmental Information Measures, which went into effect on May 1, 2008. The workshop in Weihai, which we co-sponsored with Environmental Protection Magazine, the Wendeng Municipal Government and the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), was a chance for government officials responsible for open information work to come to share their experiences and exchange ideas.

This event also marked the launch of a new 76-page report from IPE and NRDC analyzing the first year of implementation of China’s open information regulations. A Chinese version of the report – Breaking the Ice on Open Environmental Information: 2008 Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI) – can be downloaded here. An English version will be available before the end of the June.

This report is a follow-up to our announcement of preliminary results last year, and contains an in-depth look at transparency practices around China, and an introduction to international practices in environmental transparency. In particular, this report contains a substantial amount of new analysis regarding last year’s findings.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

As announced last year, there was good news and bad, and the PITI analysis highlighted some thorny issues that will need to be dealt with if environmental transparency is to truly take flight in China.

The good. Many of China’s cities have made a good start on open information. We’ve highlighted an “all-star” team made up of the top-performing cities in each of 8 categories of information evaluated – Shanghai, Taizhou, Shenzhen, Lianyungang, Beijing, Shaoxing, Kunming, and Hefei. The all-star team received a near-perfect score on our PITI scale: 89.5 out of 100. The take-away here is that some cities have already begun to demonstrate positive performance on open information in China. The argument that China is not ready or not yet developed enough to engage in good environmental transparency just does not hold water.
The bad. Overall performance on transparency was low: just over 30 points out of 100. Full compliance with current legal requirements would earn a city over 60 points.
The ugly. Many cities with heavy pollution tended also to have low disclosure. Only 24% of cities (27 of 113) actually responded to public information requests for information clearly listed in regulations as legally-required disclosure. Many cities used too-expansive interpretations of “commercial secrets” exemptions and other legal provisions to withhold information from the public. There still is no reliable forum or channel for the public to challenge inappropriate decisions to withhold information.

We make a series of recommendations to address these challenges, including: clarifying the scope of disclosure (by judicial interpretation and environmental ministry guidance), establishing fair and impartial dispute resolution mechanisms to deal with inevitable disagreements, and disclosing information – such as facility-level pollutant emissions data and environmental impact assessment reports – that is not now required to be disclosed.

Progress on Open Information in 2009

The Weihai workshop was a chance for government officials to report on their progress on information disclosure. One would hope and expect to see improvement in implementation as cities have now had two years to build up systems and staffing for information disclosure. A few developments worth noting:

Most Improved. The western city of Lanzhou, one of China’s most polluted, was also one of the worst performing cities in our PITI evaluation. Lanzhou came in 92nd out of 113 in 2008 with a mere 16.6 points. Based on their presentation at Weihai, Lanzhou may be in the running for “most improved” in our upcoming 2009 PITI ranking. Lanzhou is about to launch a major new website with a wide range of information disclosure and they have expressed a commitment to better response to public information requests. We’ll be looking out for their performance as we complete our new ranking, to be released in the fall of 2010.
Improvement in Responses to Information Requests. A team of researchers is now carrying out the second PITI evaluation. Early research is showing a higher response rate for public information requests. A full report will appear in the 2nd annual PITI evaluation.
Good News from Around the Country. A number of other cities reported interesting developments. An official from Yunnan Province noted that as their information disclosure improved, it reduced the burden placed on monitoring officials, who previously received countless requests from the public to perform monitoring of environmental quality because the information was not regularly disclosed to the public. An environmental official from Huangshi, a city near Wuhan in central China not in last year’s PITI, told us that their city had just received an RMB 800 million project from the central government to pilot open government information. Dalian noted that it had connected its 12369 complaint hotline with a web platform, such that all complaints are automatically registered online for public viewing. We’ll report on more case studies in our new ranking and report in the fall.

We have seen some progress and bright spots among the cities evaluated. The question is whether the cases we have seen are exceptions or indicative of broader trends. As we complete our new 2009 PITI ranking for the period from May 1, 2009 to May 1, 2010, we will be looking out for signs of improvement and any retrenchment. Stay tuned for the results later this year.

The China Economic Times and the Legal Daily covered the workshop (Chinese: here, here and here; Google Translate (English): 1, 2, 3).

Chinese officials talk environmental and climate governance at the National People’s Congress meetings

2010-03-16T07:59:31Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

As I’ve blogged about before, one of the keys to fighting China’s pollution problem is strengthening China’s environmental governance system. This is a view not just held by environmentalists, but one that is also held by a growing number of Chinese government officials at the highest level.

The topic of environmental governance received a surprising amount of attention last Wednesday at a high-level press conference convened to discuss China’s actions on climate change and the environment. The press conference was held in conjunction with the annual legislative session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and featured three speakers: (1) Zhang Lijun, Vice Minister of Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), (2) Xie Zhenhua, Vice Minister of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), and (3) Wang Guangtao, the Chairman of the NPC’s Environment and Natural Resources Committee.

Winning the Battle, but Losing the War?

One of the more interesting questions last week came from a reporter with the South China Morning Post, who asked Zhang Lijun of MEP how he reconciled the fact that China had succeeded in meeting its pollution reduction targets for sulfur dioxide (SO2) and chemical oxygen demand (COD), a measure of water pollution, while at the same time China’s overall environmental quality had clearly worsened. Essentially, China may have won some battles, but why is it losing the war? This question strikes at the core of China’s environmental governance system and its current strengths and weaknesses.

China set a 10 percent volume reduction target for emissions of SO2 and COD in its current 11th Five-Year Plan. With less than a year left in this five-year period, China has apparently been successful at meeting these pollution targets. As of the end of 2009, China had reduced its SO2 emissions by 13.14% (passing the target ahead of schedule) and reducing its COD discharges by 9.66%.1

This success can be attributed in large part to the fact that pollution reduction targets were elevated in importance in the current five-year plan period, and incorporated into government officials’ job evaluations. This has the impact of focusing the minds of officials even at the lowest levels on environment enforcement when determining their overall enforcement priorities (as I’ve blogged about here and here). Zhang pointed out during the press conference that some local officials from Shandong that did not meet their annual emissions reduction targets were sacked as result of their failure.

The downside of this system, however, is that it can in some cases focus officials too narrowly on a particular target, say SO2, as opposed to other environmental concerns. Imagine a local official in a lead smelter region focusing all of his or her limited resources and attention on SO2 reduction to avoid getting sacked. One might expect to see some problems with lead pollution, as we did last year.

Zhang commented that the reason China’s overall environment situation may be worsening while certain pollution reduction targets are being met is that China’s overall pollution problem (of course) is not limited to two types of pollution. While SO2 and COD have improved, nitrogen oxide (NOx), for example, has increased over the same period. As a result, China’s acid rain problem has not been reduced overall (since both SO2 and NOx are primary causes of acid rain). The conclusion: “This illustrates that the two pollutant control programs that we rely on are not enough alone to improve China’s overall environmental quality,” said Zhang. In the 12th Five-Year Plan period (commencing in 2011), MEP is therefore looking to increase the number of pollutants included in the “total emissions control” system (such as NOx) as well as expand the scope of the existing targets (such as including agricultural sources of COD).

This all may seem obvious to some, but it is an insight that is highly relevant to the current planning for China’s 12th Five-Year Plan. If China wants to successfully address its environmental challenges, it will need to quickly broaden its focus to cover a wider range of pollutants, particularly heavy metals and other toxics, fine particulate, and other pollutants particularly harmful to human health. Progress on the SO2 and COD targets should not lull anyone into believing that the hard work on environmental protection is done.

Climate and Environmental Transparency

Another hot topic at the press conference was disclosure of environmental information. Xie Zhenhua discussed transparency in the international climate change negotiations, while Zhang Lijun focused on China’s environmental disclosure system. Zhang noted that environmental officials are now required to disclose a variety of environmental information. For example, on the MEP website you can now view the environmental quality of 113 cities on a daily basis.

Environmental information disclosure is an indispensable tool for environmental regulation because it can spur companies to take proactive measures to reduce pollution in their own facilities, it raises public awareness of environmental issues and gives the public the tools it needs to identify and handle environmental risks. While narrowly defined, top-down pollution reduction targets are effective at focusing officials’ attention on a limited set of pollutants, information disclosure empowers other stakeholders to monitor the environmental performance in a more comprehensive way.

It is important that senior officials are raising transparency in such a visible way. Among Chinese ministries, MEP has been the most aggressive advocate for greater information transparency. Open information in China will not live up to its potential though until facility-level pollution information is more widely available. In China, it is still not possible to obtain facility-level pollution information for most factories. Only certain significantly polluting enterprises are required to disclose their emissions data. Even so, many refuse to do so and suffer few consequences for this. Environmental protection can be a challenging business, but broadening facility-level environmental transparency is one of the easiest and quickest ways for China to reduce pollution and reduce the enforcement burden on its perennially overstretched environmental agencies. It is relatively inexpensive and technically uncomplicated, and a number of cities around China are already making quiet, but impressive progress on environmental transparency (see the conclusions from our 2008 Pollution Information Transparency Index in partnership with IPE). Moreover, MEP can give environmental transparency in China a big push forward by disclosing the raw data from its recent national pollution census. This data set will be an invaluable tool that the public, academics and other stakeholders can use to identify and address China’s most serious pollution problems.

This little noticed focus on environmental governance last week is a good sign that we hope will serve as the foundation for a strong push to strengthen environmental governance in the 12th Five-Year Plan period.

__________

1 The major caveat to this is the outcome of China’s recently announced first national pollution source census, which found that COD discharge in 2007 was more than twice the levels originally announced for 2007 (30.3 million metric tons, in the pollution census v. 13.8 million metric tons, originally announced). This was attributed largely to inclusion of agricultural sources in the census and different calculation methods. The 11th Five-Year Plan COD targets apparently will continue to be measured against the sources identified prior to the census.

China and Copenhagen: Resolutions for 2010

2010-01-06T12:20:12Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

This blog was co-authored with Barbara Finamore and Alvin Lin.

The thrust and parry of the post-Copenhagen blame game reached a fever pitch just before the holidays with a number of media articles suggesting that China was responsible for an unsatisfactory outcome at the climate meetings.

The article that has gotten the most attention has been one by Mark Lynas entitled: How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room (Guardian, Dec. 22). In the days after the article was published it was virtually the only article being “retweeted” under the #COP15 tag on Twitter. The central premise of the Guardian piece was that China, despite presenting itself as a constructive player, intentionally played the spoiler in the climate negotiations. In Lynas’ view, this is why China vetoed the efforts by developed countries to set a target for reducing their own emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and engaged in a variety of other tactics.

Was the Copenhagen Accord a Failure?

The spirit of the holiday season seems to have calmed the rhetoric down over this past week. Nonetheless, we still felt it important to weigh in on what to make of Copenhagen because our take on the dynamics of the negotiations and whether or not the Copenhagen Accord was a “failure” is a bit different than Lynas’. What happens in 2010 will be critical to whether we can effectively meet the challenge of climate change, so it is imperative that we start off on more constructive footing.

Let's keep in mind what had happened in the lead-up to Copenhagen. Realistically, a full, legally binding agreement was extremely unlikely after Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s proposal for a “one agreement, two steps” process at the APEC meeting in mid-November had gained support from many world leaders. Instead, the expectation was that some form of "political agreement" would be reached in Copenhagen, with a final legally binding treaty to be worked out in 2010. So, in our view, the proper yardstick for evaluating the success of Copenhagen is whether progress was made that will (i) get us closer to a fair and ambitious global agreement in 2010, and (ii) facilitate passage of comprehensive U.S. climate legislation.

The Copenhagen Accord had at least three steps that pushed us forward based on this yardstick, which our colleague Jake Schmidt blogged about here:

First, in the run-up to Copenhagen countries representing more than 85% of the world’s global warming pollution set forth plans to reduce or slow the rate of growth of emissions, and these will be brought forward as commitments that are part of the accord by the end of January 2010.
Second, the announcement of a significant ramp-up in funding ($100 billion by 2020) from developed countries to developing countries was important. This funding needs to be greater and a number of scientists and groups have already said so. But this is a good start.
Third, the agreement to biannual reporting on mitigation actions and emissions, subject to “international consultations and analysis under clearly defined guidelines that will ensure that national sovereignty is respected” was another important step.

These advances will obviously need to be elaborated through further negotiations, and how well they are implemented will be critical to judging the ultimate success of the accord. But in the near-term we think the agreement on transparency will help get the climate bill through the Senate. Moreover, passage of climate legislation in the United States next year would be a major game changer (which the Copenhagen Accord would have helped nudge along) and will lead to a much more productive dynamic for addressing climate change in the G20, Major Economies Forum, and COP16 in Mexico. This dynamic will have its first boost in little over a month as countries associating with the Copenhagen Accord set forth the mitigation targets and actions they will commit to ahead of the January 31, 2010 deadline. Of course, the step forward on transparency is also important because, assuming the details are worked out consistent with the spirit of the accord, it will help to move us toward a better sense of how the largest emitters in the world are doing to reduce their emissions.

Did China Play the Spoiler?

British media coverage has pressed the "China wrecked the deal" angle, suggesting that China acted in bad faith by such actions as vetoing any long-term 2050 targets for the accord. But this judgment fails to consider the negotiating perspective that China and other developing countries have consistently espoused, namely that developed countries have used up most of the global "carbon space" and so should bear the bulk of the responsibility and cost for mitigating global emissions. Taking into account this perspective, China’s reported actions could be seen to reflect its disagreement with developed countries on how future mitigation burdens should be allocated considering historical responsibilities, rather than a flat-out desire to block any long-term deal as Lynas suggests. One might also ask why the U.S. and other developed countries have not faced similar outrage from the press for not offering up deeper emissions cuts and greater support for developing countries, given their historical contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and much greater per capita emissions. This was despite criticism that environmental groups leveled at the U.S. and other developed countries for insufficiently ambitious proposals. These are substantive differences among the countries that need to be worked out, and we do not get any closer to resolving these differences with accusations of bad faith. In any case, China and the rest of the world will have an opportunity to demonstrate the full extent of their commitment to addressing climate change in the coming year, as countries work toward completing a final climate agreement before the end of 2010 and begin to implement their climate targets. The proof of how constructive each of the countries has been will be in whether we have an effective, binding climate agreement before 2010 is through.

In the end, we know that China will need to be part of any effective global climate change deal. The hard work has really just begun and every country will have the opportunity in the coming year to rise to the occasion. So we should put aside the recriminations and get on to the business of forging a new climate agreement in 2010.

Copenhagen in Pictures - Time to Step Up to an Agreement (UPDATED)

2009-12-18T08:05:46Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

[Update (3:25pm local time): Wen and Obama both spoke this morning and we are clearly not yet at an agreement. Wen's talk contained important language about transparency, international dialogue and cooperative exchange. Obama emphasized that "We are ready to get this done today!" Obama and Wen met for 55 minutes after their talks and apparently made progress on all three of the issues that Obama raised in his speech: mitigation, transparency and financing. The negotiators will need to head in to overtime now to hash out the details.]

We are on alert to listen to speeches from Obama, Wen and others. Today is the day to make a breakthrough. As we wrote earlier this week, the US and China have started to make positive moves to break the climate impasse (also here). The countries have literally been working around the clock (Su Wei said on Wed that he'd been up for more than 50 hours) and we expect the pay off to come today. We'll report back as soon as we hear what the leaders announce. In the meantime, here are some pictures from the past week in Copenhagen...

Protests inside Bella

Polar bears

Prince Charles

Minister Xie Zhenhua of China after the BASIC press conference with India, Brazil and South Africa

China Information & Communication Center, where crowds gathered to listen to each China press event.

Vice-Minister He Yafei speaking last Friday

US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announcing Renewables and Efficiency Deployment Initiative (Climate REDI)

Wednesday night plenary session 10:35pm - working through procedures, procedures, and more procedures...

Copenhagen Week One Wrap-Up

2009-12-15T12:24:42Z

Alex Wang, NRDC Alum, Beijing, China

One week down, an agreement to go. The first week at Copenhagen was intense in and out of the Bella Center. Inside, thousands of government bureaucrats and staffers mixed with thousands of environmental advocates, researchers, students, journalists, bloggers and a guy dressed in a polar bear suit. The media and blogosphere played up the atmospherics of shocking “secret” draft texts, sharp words and session stoppages, but most people realize these are just part of the game. There are real differences to be worked out, but my colleague Jake Schmidt describes the reasons we are optimistic for a positive agreement this week and highlights the issues to look out for. The first week has narrowed the issues and produced a short draft text (see here). For the first time ever, we have major plans of action from all emerging economies and strong targets from most of the developed countries. Moreover, we’ll soon have an unpredecented gathering here of over a hundred heads of government who will arrive to finalize an agreement. This sort of focus and commitment is unprecedented.

Outside, city was relatively quiet yesterday after anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 protestors took to the streets (and nearly 1,000 were arrested) on Saturday.

China and the US

“The Fate of Climate is in Your Hands” Courtesy of Global Voices Online

The media focused last week on the various barbs thrown around by SU Wei (China’s chief climate negotiator), HE Yafei(a vice-minister at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and Todd Stern (US Special Climate Envoy) (video). But there was more smoke than fire, as both countries want to come to a political deal by the end of this week. At SU Wei’s more sparsely attended Saturday press conference, he took a less combative tone and noted that China’s slogan for this 2ndweek of negotiations was to: “enhance confidence, consolidate consensus, strengthen cooperation, and implement actions.” The arc of the negotiation seems just about right to mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js"> us here. Both the US and China stepped up with targets in advance of Copenhagen to set a constructive tone for the negotiations, came out of their corners swinging earlier this week to establish their positions, and ended the week on a constructive note. They will all be scrambling early this week to hammer out the key details before the world leaders start to arrive mid-week.

To MRV or Not to MRV?

One of the big issues for the week will be on the question of how countries stand behind their commitments and how they do so in a transparent manner. In climate parlance, this is known as “measure, report and verify” (MRV) (whether it be actions, emissions inventories or technical/financial support).

The position of China, India and the so-called “BASIC” countries (Brazil, South Africa) is that actions supported by developed countries will be subject to international review, but that actions without support will only be domestically, not internationally, reviewed. China has been laying out the case that it has put in place institutions to measure data and drive implementation of its climate targets, which should give other countries comfort that China is meeting its targets. We’ve talked about the efforts that China has made in this regard to use complex bureaucratic evaluations, itsTop 1000 energy consuming enterprises program and other measures.

The US position is that commitments should all be transparent, part of the international agreement, and put through a “consultative-type process” for some sort of appropriate international review.

So how do we “get to yes” here? There is a great deal of space for creative thinking if the countries are willing to step away from their postions, and focus on their interests. The US interest (and the goal of the climate treaty in general) is to better understand how all major emitters are doing on their efforts to “bend the curve” on or reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. China is interested in preventing inappropriate intrusion on its sovereignty. Look for room to compromise on the scope and frequency of any reviews of actions or emissions inventories, as well as use of facilitative review focused on capacity building and technical support. China actually has a good deal of innovative practice and experience and may be willing to show this off on the international stage. The US should be willing to step to appropriate international review and transparency as well to stand behind its commitments.