Hunan province in Central China will conduct real-time air quality monitoring in all the counties province-wide by the end of the year, the Hunan Daily reported citing Liu Yaochen, head of the provincial environmental protection bureau.

Liu made his remarks during an interview in response to a question regarding the appeal made by some residents from county-level areas in the province, who wanted to find out about the exact conditions of local air quality.

Starting from Jan 1, 2015, one year ahead of the schedule of national regulations, all the 14 prefecture-level cities in Hunan have realized real-time monitoring to six air quality indexes such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, PM10, PM2.5, carbon monoxide, and ozone.

At present, local environmental protection department is speeding up efforts to build an air monitoring network covering all the counties (county-level cities, and districts), achieving actual time monitoring on three indexes – sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and PM10.

In recent years, the province has launched major supervisions on the desulfurization and denitrifying work by enterprises in sectors such as thermal power, iron and steel and cement.

In 2014, all the thermal power generating units with capacities above 30 million kilowatts in Hunan have finished facility construction for fume desulfurization and denitrifying. Sixty-five dry method cement production lines have been equipped with denitrifying infrastructure.

This year, the environment protection department will continue its crackdown on pollution generated by the chemical industry. The province has set aside 70 million yuan ($ 11.27 million) to tackle pollution by power plants. The fund will be used for 27 pollution prevention projects concerning 14 large-scale thermal power plants.

According to Hunan Provincial Environment Monitoring Center, motor vehicle exhaust is the primary source of PM2.5 in Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan city cluster area. Starting from March 1, the Wuyi Avenue in Changsha has launched 24-hour access restrictions to yellow-label and labelless vehicles. It is expected that restrictions to these heavy-polluting vehicles will be extended to all urban areas in the city by 2017.

The aggravated tendency of air pollution in Hunan’s major cities has been curbed. The average number of days with air quality meeting safety standards in the six major cities of Changsha, Zhuzhou, Xiangtan, Changde, Yueyang, and Zhangjiajie, reached 67.4 percent in 2014. The same rate in the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan city cluster area has increased by 7.2 percent compared with the year before.

Edited by Mevlut Katik