China continues improving environmental quality despite challenges

Despite unfavorable meteorological conditions last year, China managed to keep good momentum for steady improvements in its environmental quality, said Huang Runqiu, minister of ecology and environment.

He made the remarks in an interview following a plenary meeting of the second session of the 14th National People's Congress in Beijing on Friday.

"The past year of 2023 was a very complex year for environmental protection work, and we encountered many difficulties and challenges," he noted, citing air pollution control as an example.

The rapid recovery of economic activities after the COVID-19 epidemic has significantly increased the emissions of pollutants in some sectors, he said. This resulted in great pressure on maintaining the quality of the atmospheric environment.

The El Nino, a periodic event that involves warming currents in the Pacific Ocean, further complicated the situation, the minister said.

Under the impact of a new El Nino episode, China was increasingly and frequently hit by successive cold and warm spells, while experiencing a rise in its average temperature. This "brought significant adverse impacts to the efforts to improve air quality", he noted.

Due to cold airs, the country suffered 17 sandy and dusty weather events in 2023, which outpaced any other years in the past decade. These events were to blame for the 3.3 percentage points of decrease in the country's proportion of days with fairly good air quality — considered to be below 100 on the 0-500 air quality index scale, he said.

In the end of last year, haze enveloped a vast stretch of regions because of unfavorable meteorological conditions that feature high temperature and humidity and stable air, he stated. Due to the haze, the average density of PM2.5 particulate matter in 2023 increased by 1.1 micrograms per cubic meter.

Huang said the ministry, together with many other departments, rolled out a series of effective measures last year to mitigate the adverse impacts from the complex situation.

The ultra-low emissions transformation in the steel industry, for example, was accelerated. The transformation was completed for 220 metric tons of steel production capacity in the year, over three times of that in the previous three years, he said.

He said 2 million rural households in northern China shifted to other types of clean energy to warm up their homes instead of burning coal with small stoves.

Thanks to these measures, the average PM2.5 concentration in prefecture-level cities and above reached 30 mcg/cubic m last year, maintaining a general momentum of steady improvement, he said.

Compared with 2019, the year before COVID-19 broke out, the PM2.5 density last year decreased by 16.7 percent, he said.

The minister noted even more satisfactory improvement in water environment.

Last year, 89.4 percent of monitoring sections for surface water across the country registered fairly good quality, which is even 4.4 percentage points higher than the country's target for 2025, he said.

China has a five-tier quality system for surface water, with Grade I as the best. The quality can be considered as being fairly good if it reaches Grade III.

Huang vowed a series of measures to promote continuous environmental improvement.

He said the ministry plans to launch campaigns dedicated to air pollution control, aquatic environment improvement, rural environment management and the risk control of hazardous waste this year, respectively.

The country will continue to optimize its structures of industry, energy consumption and transportation, he said.

"We will further enhance the protection and supervision of the country's ecosystems and strive to sustain their stability, sustainability and diversity," he said.