China releases first national pollution census

BEIJING - China has revealed its most ambitious measure of what explosive development has done to its environment, reporting yesterday that its first national pollution census has mapped nearly six million sources of industrial, residential, and agricultural waste.

The largest of those involved China's total discharge of chemical oxygen demand - the main gauge of water pollution. Those discharges totaled 30.3 million tons in 2007, the survey showed.

In recent years, China had performed a much narrower calculation of these discharges, excluding fertilizers and pesticides as well as fluids leaking from landfills. By that narrower measure, discharges came to only 13.8 million tons in 2007.

Factoring in the agricultural sources into its pollution studies is "huge," said Deborah Seligsohn, principal adviser for the World Resources Institute on China's climate and energy issues.

"Many challenges China faces in terms of water quality come from organic pollution rather than from chemicals."

Chinese officials said yesterday that the nation's pollution levels might peak sooner than expected as China tries to balance economic and green concerns.

The central government has a year to use the survey's results to shape its next five-year environmental-protection plan. Ministries are also studying the possibility of an environmental tax, China's vice minister of environmental protection, Zhang Lijun, told a news conference.

The survey, which took two years and 570,000 staff to complete, puts China ahead of other developing countries in having a detailed map of who is polluting and where. The survey is to be repeated in 2020.

In the meantime, detailed census results remain out of the view of an increasingly vocal Chinese public. Only the government and officials at relevant ministries have access to it.

Ma Jun, a noted Chinese environmentalist, and Greenpeace China are pushing for more transparency on the pollution front.

"We urge the government to immediately establish a strong platform through which the public could easily access a wide range of pollution data," said Sze Pang Cheung of Greenpeace China.

Opening up the survey results would let the Chinese public monitor the country's biggest polluters and the worst polluted areas, said Yu Jie, head of policy and research programs for the Climate Group China.