Saturday, April 30, 2016

Book review: China’s Renewable Energy Revolution


John A Mathews and Hao Tan’s new book provides an excellent account of the policies driving China’s green transition –  but feels light on politics and power, writes Sam Geall
Article image
 The book highlights the global significance of China’s energy revolution, but overlooks local innovation and politics.  (Image of solar powered water heaters in Dezhou by 绿色和平/苏里)
Looking at the fortunes of Italian cities in the 16th century, the philosopher and economist Antonio Serra drew a comparison between the wealth of Venice, booming due to trade and manufacturing, and the poverty of Naples, which had based its economy on the mining of metals.

It might seem an unusual point to find in a monograph about China’s electric power system, but the contrast, for the scholars John Mathews and Hao Tan, is an important one.

China, they write, is “liberating itself” from the extractive economy around fossil fuels, with all its hostile “geopolitical entanglements” and negative local and global environmental impacts.

Instead, it is becoming the “world’s first case of a country breaking free of carbon lock-in by building its own renewable energy industries”.

This process, they argue, is “primarily motivated by concerns over its immediate pollution, as well as issues of energy security and industrial development in the medium and longer run”.

Reductions in the carbon emissions that cause climate change are not the end point. Rather, they are a “highly convenient side-effect” of this grand political-economic transition.

Recognising this, the authors argue that massive investments in a power grid that can better support the development of renewables should be seen as China’s “21
st century great infrastructure project” – comparable to the building of the Grand Canal, completed during the Sui dynasty in the 7th century AD – which will give the country a good chance of escaping the fossil fuel-reliance that afflicted “earlier industrial powers.”

Just as Germany and the UK dominated coal-based technologies in the 19th century, and the US became world-leader in oil-based technologies in the 20th century, Mathews and Tan see China emerging as world leader in the products and technologies around electric power from renewable sources like solar and wind. The country is poised to create “ a new energy paradigm with epochal implications”, they argue.

These far-reaching conclusions are not conjecture: the authors base their conclusions on recent data about China’s electricity generation, investment, patents and more.

Of particular value is the authors’ grounding in the
theory of innovation and industrial dynamics. Mathews and Tan explain convincingly, for example, how the likely transition pathway from “black” (fossil) industries to green – as entrepreneurs commit to a new industries, and others seek to follow them – could become “self-reinforcing, self-sustaining and irreversible”.

They explain how China’s scale of production has exploited the cost reductions, for solar panels and wind turbines for example, that come with accumulated experience, helping China to generate a quarter of its electricity from non-thermal sources.

Recent data show drastic growth in solar power generation. Interestingly, the authors also argue, based on this data, that since wind and solar generated electricity already both exceed nuclear,  China will not be dependent on nuclear for its non-carbon sources of electric
power.

This “iron law of the learning curve”, combined with industrial strategy and “well-formulated targets” under its Five Year Plans, has contributed to China’s disarticulation of energy consumption from economic growth. Last year saw a possible peak in coal consumption, as well as declining coal production and thermal power generation: “a momentous triple milestone for China and for the world.”

Politics of power
Still, for a study that seeks “to engage with the political economy of China’s renewable energy transition”, their analysis feels light on politics. The impression isn’t helped by occasional inconsistencies and misspellings of elite figures and institutions.

More substantively, there are many energy policies mentioned throughout the monograph. And while this attention is helpful and necessary, the reader might come away with the assumption that these policies had a history of technocratic formulation and effective implementation.

Greater attention to the politics of electricity in China – both elite and ground-level – might at least change the texture of the analysis. Or put another way, the book is focused on energy, but has less to say about power.

At the central level, it could have illuminated the history of protracted bargaining and conflicts around electricity sector reform, about which I would have expected to read more.

At the local level, there are many more questions one might ask: how will provincial-level officials in coal counties adjust to a slowing, innovation-based economy, if this means reskilling an enormous workforce, or dealing with the social consequences of mass unemployment? How do local people feel about huge, land-based renewable-energy installations that generate electricity for faraway cities, and revenue for utilities, but little in terms of local jobs?   

Bottom-up innovation

Furthermore, the top-down focus of the book means it overlooks a number of interesting bottom-up dynamics – not only industrial, but also social – that are shaping China’s energy transition.

There are, for example, demand-led successes to be found in the
widespread uptake of solar-water heaters in China’s rural areas, and electric bicycles using lithium-ion batteries in urban areas. NGOs and socially minded first-adopters of solar PV have driven the implementation of the feed-in tariff, often despite resistance from local grids.

Public anxieties and even protest is likely to shape policy-making around the country’s low-carbon energy choices, particularly where nuclear is concerned. And in some cases, local or municipal governments (such as in Shandong province and, in particular, Dezhou city) seem to have provided crucial support for green innovation, complementing central government R&D programmes.

Overall, however, China’s Renewable Energy Revolution is a valuable, concise and up-to-date guide to key aspects of China’s unfolding transition – one that is vital not only for the country but also for the global climate.

Its concluding message, for advanced economies looking to counter the competitive threat posed by China’s strong support for low-carbon technologies, is also one that resonated strongly with this reviewer: to abandon trade retaliation, and instead to support similarly aggressive industrial policy that will drive green innovation and market expansion at home.

However, the obstacle here again – in the US or UK today, much as it would have been in
16th century Italy – is less the lack of smart policies, than it is the politics.
courtesy:chinadialogue

Air pollution falls by 10% in China’s major cities


Beijing makes gains in the fight against smog, says new report from Greenpeace
Article image
(Image by Lu Guang/ Greenpeace)
Air pollution levels fell by 10.3% in China last year. However, 80% of cities are still in breach of national standards, according to a new report by Greenpeace East Asia.
China’s efforts to clean up air pollution appear to be having an effect. The average concentration of dangerous PM2.5 particulate in the air of 366 major cities has fallen to 50.2 micrograms per cubic metre. However, it remains well over the government-set standard of 35 micrograms and that of the World Health Organisation, which is 10 micrograms.

The five municipalities or provinces with the worst levels of PM2.5 pollution were Henan, Beijing, Hebei, Tianjin and Shandong. The purest air was found in Hainan, Tibet, Yunnan, Fujian and Guizhou, according to the
2015 China City Rankings.


Greenpeace’s city rankings are based on real-time monitoring data published by the cities themselves.The report praised China’s progress in making air quality data public. In 2014, only 190 Chinese cities disclosed their PM2.5 levels. In 2015, 367 cities published six different types of air quality measurements, including the level of PM2.5 in the air. This is the largest release of data since new government standards came into effect in 2012.

Beijing’s average PM2.5 level fell 3.3% year-on-year, to 80.4 micrograms per cubic metre between 2014 and 2015. However in Shanghai an increase of 3% was seen, pushing levels up to 53.9 micrograms.

Environmental campaigner Dong Liansai told
chinadialogue that the increase in Shanghai’s pollution is partly down to the government's failure to enforce clear targets for reducing coal consumption.

By contrast, Beijing and its surrounding areas are subject to much stricter air quality standards and coal reduction targets. By 2017, Beijing aims to have reduced coal use by 13 million tonnes per year, Tianjin by 10 million tonnes, Hebei by 40 million tonnes, and Shandong by 20 million tonnes.

Looking at the data alone, most parts of the country appear to have had some success in combating air pollution. But public sentiment suggests that the winter of 2015 was particularly bad for smog, symbolised by Beijing issuing its first smog 'red alert' at the start of December.

Smog is more common in winter, as greater amounts of coal are burned for heat. Last winter, 18 Chinese cities saw 20 or more days of smog: Baoding had 35, while Beijing had 26. Seventy-six cities suffered three or more consecutive days of heavy pollution, which twice triggered Beijing’s Heavy Air Pollution Emergency Response Plan - the 'red alert'. 

Data from Weather Underground, an online weather service, found that last winter had more of the calm and humid days that helps smog form – 41 days met these conditions in November and December, compared to 19 in the same period in 2014.

While weather conditions were a major cause of the high incidence of winter smog, coal-burning is still the major cause of air pollution in China.

Greenpeace recommends that the government sets a national coal consumption cap for the
13th Five Year Plan period (2016 -2021), to further improve air quality. It also calls for quantified targets for reducing PM2.5 levels nationally, not just for certain municipalities and provinces
courtesy:chinadialogue

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Hebei's lung cancer spike raises questions about role of pollution


Deaths from lung cancer have tripled in Hebei province over the last 40 years, but to what extent is air pollution to blame? By Zhang Chun
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Face masks are a common sight in Hebei and other heavily-polluted areas of China as citizens try and protect themselves from deadly diseases caused by smog, which could include cancer
The number of deaths caused by lung cancer in Hebei, a heavily-industrialised province just south of Beijing, has risen threefold in the last 40 years, according to a report released in recent weeks by the Hebei Cancer Institute.

Big increases in the number of lung cancer-related deaths have been recorded across China. An estimated 7,500 people a day died from cancer in 2015, reported the medical paper, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. Cancer is now the country’s biggest killer.

“Lung cancer mortality has risen 221% nationwide over the last 40 years, with incidence rates growing by roughly the same amount. So a 306% increase in Hebei isn’t too surprising,” said Chen Wanqing, deputy head of the China Cancer Reporting Centre.

Since the publication of the report in January, the link between lung cancer and air pollution has become the subject of national debate, although tobacco use in China is still most likely to be the cause deaths related to lung cancer in China.
In Hebei, 35.22 people in every 100,000 die from lung cancer annually, according to local government statistics. While nationally, it is 40.98 among every 100,000 who live in cities, and 38.78 in rural areas, according to the 2013 edition of the China Health Statistics Yearbook.
So while air pollution in Hebei is considerably worse than most provinces, its lung cancer rates are in tune with the national average. This suggests that air pollution is not the primary cause of the spike.

In 2015, Peking University and Greenpeace issued a joint report saying that prolonged exposure to PM2.5 pollution can cause ischemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. These diseases combined accounted for over 257,000 deaths in China in 2013.

But it was two years before the Greenpeace study that the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer published a report that established a strong link between lung cancer and outdoor air pollution.

Based on almost 1,000 studies from five continents, the IRAC concluded that the particulate matter in air pollution is carcinogenic.

In Hebei, which languishes at the bottom of China’s air quality index tables, scientists say more studies into the health impacts of air pollution are needed.

Professor Pan Xiaochuan of Peking University’s School of Public Health told chinadialogue it is too early to be certain that rising cancer rates are a consequence of air pollution, but that foul air is likely to reflected in cancer rates in the years to come.

“There may be a link, but there first needs to be more epidemiological evidence before you can be sure,” Pan said.

He added: “But you can expect that the serious air pollution in Hebei over the last 20 years will probably result in an increased incidence of lung cancer in the next 5-10 years,” he added.

While deadly air pollution is an important contributing factor, it is not the leading cause of lung cancer worldwide.

Urban cancer rates
Smoking is the number one cause of lung cancer on a global basis, followed by exposure to radon—an odourless and tasteless radioactive gas emitted from rocks and contaminated soil. So exposure to air pollution may only rank third as a cause of lung cancer.

Globally, other contributory factors are cited, such as indoor air pollution caused by heating and cooking that uses coal and other biomass fuels; and waterborne carcinogens, a growing source of exposure.

In China, lung cancer affects men and those living in urban areas disproportionately. The gender imbalance is reflective of the high number of men who smoke in China – around 68% - said experts. However, the spike in urban areas is attributed to air pollution.

A Beijing doctor, who asked not to be named, told chinadialogue that he has seen a big increase in the number of patients with respiratory problems over the last two years. He put this down to smoking, indoor and outdoor air pollution and genetics.

Ageing population

In 2010, Chen’s research team reported that rising cancer rates are an impact of China’s rapidly ageing population.
Meanwhile, according to the Beijing doctor, if deaths accounted for by this factor are removed from the data, then lung cancer mortality actually fell by 0.55% between 1988 and 2005.

In China, cancer is seen as a disease of older generations. In 2013, there were only 9.29 deaths from lung cancer per 100,000 people aged 40 to 45. But among people aged 70 to 75 there were 264.10 deaths; and among those over 85 there were 491.17, according to the most up-to-date figures from the China Health Statistics Yearbook.

Chen said that in the early 1970s, healthcare in China was poor and the average life expectancy of the population much lower. Many cancer cases went unrecognised or unreported; and particularly in rural areas, people didn’t even seek treatment.

Tobacco

The causal link between smoking and cancer has been known in China since the 1950s.

In China, tobacco smoking accounts for about one-quarter of all cancer deaths, with the country home to 300 million smokers, according to WHO data from 2010.
That is almost one third of the world’s total, and smoking rates in adolescents and young adults are still rising.

Whatever the cause, carcinogens can take years to show their effect on the body, which means any measures to combat it now will not show results until long into the future.
Courtesy:cjinadialogue

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Friday, April 29, 2016

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Top films on China and the environment


Our pick of some of the recent films on China and the environment, and a few classics thrown in
Article image
(Still from the 2006 film Behemoth)
The Road (2015)

Independent film maker Zhang Zangbo spend three years embedded in a construction company in central China’s Hunan province. The result is a powerful and shocking insight into the human and environmental costs of China’s infrastructure boom.

Zhang documents the corruption and abuse behind the construction of a stretch of the provincial highway by local officials and gangsters. It centres around protagonist Mr Meng – company vice president and “problem solver”– as he deals with injured workers demanding compensation; local people whose homes are destroyed, their family graves dug up, sacred trees and Buddhist temples flattened; local thugs demanding payment; and communist officials inspecting unsafe construction work.

This film is particularly poignant at a time when China’s companies are going overseas to build roads and infrastructure in countries with even weaker governance than the backwaters of Hunan.

Behemoth (2016)

This documentary combines with art film to produce a powerful testament to the human and environmental costs of coal mining and consumption in China, the world’s biggest user of coal and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Director Zhao Liang– whose past work has exposed the fate of the most marginalised in Chinese society – shot the film on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia and in the “ghost town” of Ordos to show how rapid development has created hell on earth in China.

(Zhao Liang has given chinadialogue permission to use this video clip. It cannot be republished on any other platform)

The Mermaid  (2016)

This is a madcap aquatic comedy about a real estate tycoon who tries to redevelop an idyllic island and dolphin reserve, only to find himself the target of a wrathful group of merpeople.

Fans of Steven Chow will be familiar with the slapstick nonsensical humour, reminiscent of his earlier films Shaolin Soccer and Kung-fu Hustle. But deep down the underlying message is how humans are destroying the environment. The film ends with a merperson massacre reminiscent of hard hitting
ecodoc The Cove.

The self-made business tycoon Liu Xuan is forced to come to terms with the fact his money is worthless in a world without "one single drop of clean water to drink or fresh air to breathe".
Up The Yangtze (2007)

This documentary follows a 16-year-old girl who leaves school to work as a hostess on a luxury cruise boat on the Yangtze – organised for western tourists to wave goodbye to the disappearing landscape. During the film, the girl's family, who are subsistence farmers, must move to higher ground as their home is inundated by the flooding of the Three Gorges Dam – which displaced 1.3 million people. Canadian-Chinese director Yung Chang’s beautifully shot film captures the beauty of the river and the aspirations and struggles of young people in a rapidly changing modern China.

Jia Zhangke’s film Still Life (三峡好人) is another excellent but slower-moving account of the same topic: it depicts the fictional experiences of the people of Fengjie a small town on the Yangtze flooded by The Three Gorges. The director’s hallmarks are beautiful cinematography, long stares and little action.

Mountain Patrol: Kekexili (2004)

This film tracks the struggle of a small group of Tibetan park rangers against a band of poachers in the remote Tibetan region of Kekexili. The low budget project was shot on the Tibetan plateau, and most of the roles are played by local amateur actors.

It is based on a true story about the "Wild Yak Brigade", a volunteer group in the 1990s who tried to stop the Tibetan antelope being hunted to extinction for their fine wool.

Subsequently, the Chinese government declared Kekexili a "national nature preserve" and established a forestry bureau to protect it – and the number of antelopes have rebounded. However railways, dams and other large planned projects on the plateau now pose new threats to antelope habitat and migration routes.

West of the Tracks (2002)

This nine hour epic charts the economic demise of one of the most densely populated industrial areas of northeast China. From 1999 director Wang Bing took a long journey across the railway that cuts through Shenyang province, the region that was once the heart of the planned central economy with its labour-intense steel works and blast furnaces. The province was also the focus of economic reform and bankruptcies that led to the demolition of many industrial plants, heaping hordes of desolate workers onto the unemployment scrapheap.

The observational documentary offers a fascinating insight into the backrooms and workers’ quarters of half-abandoned factories. Over a decade later, it resonates strongly as the region faces a fresh wave of lay-offs as coal and steel plants shut down to make way for a 'greener' China. 

courtesy:chinadialogue

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Could domestic politics shake the US–Japan alliance?



Author: Pandu Utama Manggala, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies
Signed in 1951, the US–Japan Security Treaty and the alliance it established have endured for over six decades and continue to play an instrumental role in shaping the regional security order. But with Republican presidential nominee frontrunner Donald Trump’s ‘America first’ isolationist foreign policy views gaining traction in the United States, concerns are mounting over the future of the alliance.
US President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the Nuclear Security Summit. (Photo: AAP)
Trump has stated that he would not hesitate to reconsider America’s longstanding alliances with Japan and South Korea if they cease to be of benefit to the United States. He further adds that under his leadership, the United States would seek to renegotiate many one-sided yet fundamental treaties with American allies, including the one with Japan. So can the US–Japan alliance withstand this upshot in domestic criticism?
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has repeatedly stated that the US–Japan alliance will continue to be the cornerstone of Japan’s security policy. Strengthening the alliance is one of the three pillars of Japan’s new defence policy, alongside developing Japan’s own self-defence capabilities and actively promoting security cooperation with other countries to ensure international peace and security.
For the United States, the alliance serves as the basis for its Asian ‘pivot’ strategy. Former secretary of state, and Democratic presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton asserted that the US ‘treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand are the fulcrum for the strategic turn to the Asia Pacific’. These alliances must be maintained in order to achieve the common vision of a stable regional order. And they likely will be.
Not only is the US–Japan alliance looking solid, but it appears that both countries are looking to further strengthen it. This sentiment gained momentum after the official visit of Abe to the United States in April 2015. Both leaders have also reaffirmed their commitment to the alliance by announcing the revised Guidelines for US–Japan Defense Cooperation. The revised document acknowledges the regional shifts in the balance of power, Japan’s altered defence posture, and the emerging transnational threats to Japan and the United States.
The outlook for the US–Japan alliance has also improved with the passage of Japan’s security-related bills in September 2015, which allows the Japan Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to play a greater role in maintaining international peace and stability under the banner of a ‘proactive contributions to peace’. The alliance is now explicitly global in scope and aims to be more balanced and effective.
But, as the alliance expands, the limitations faced by both Washington and Tokyo must be managed carefully. With the relative decline in US power, the future of global leadership is uncertain. As such, there is a risk that the United States could pursue the same ‘isolationist policy’ that US presidential hopeful Donald Trump has been advocating so strongly. Alternatively, there is a risk that the United States might try to drag Japan into unnecessary conflicts.
And, while Japan’s new security laws expand the role of the SDF, its ability to exercise collective self-defence is still limited under strict conditions. With these limitations in mind, both Washington and Tokyo must elevate the alliance to the next step by developing a more multifaceted partnership.
The United States and Japan are already taking this next step through strengthening trilateral cooperation with like-minded partners such as Australia and India. For instance, Japan and India upgraded their relationship to a ‘Special Strategic and Global Partnership’ during Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Japan in 2014. The relationship has gone from strength to strength ever since, and has included a successful US–India–Japan Malabar naval exercise in 2015.
As for the Australia–Japan relationship, the two countries have forged a ‘special strategic partnership’ that seeks to advance both Canberra and Tokyo’s national interests and to ‘multiply their capabilities to meet joint security challenges’ in the region. Japan’s bid to build Australia’s new submarine fleet, if successful, will provide the crucial strategic element to deepen the partnership not only between the two countries, but also with Washington. This forward-looking approach is important because it recognises the rise of emerging economies in the Asia Pacific and slowly moves from the perspective of United States as an external balancer.
But such trilateral cooperation is still not enough of a confidence building measure to peacefully manage the current geostrategic transition. China has to be included. One way around this could be for Japan to establish an informal gathering between the United States, Japan and Asia’s rising powers, such as China, India, Australia and Indonesia. This gathering could then be used as a consultation mechanism for security issues in the region, including developing functional cooperation in the South China Sea as well as re-examining the effectiveness of the US forward deployment strategy in Asia.
It appears that the US–Japan alliance will not only survive the upsurge in isolationist rhetoric within the United States but will continue to deepen into the future. Yet, to successfully address new challenges and seize new opportunities, the alliance should also be adaptive and develop more multifaceted partnerships with other rising powers in the region.
Pandu Utama Manggala is a PhD scholar at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo. 
courtesy:https://www.chinadialogue.net/blog/8743-China-s-curbs-on-domestic-logging-could-worsen-deforestation-abroad-/en

Generalising the middle income trap


Author: Mark Fabian, ANU
The middle income trap has recently come (back) into vogue as a theoretical construct for understanding why some countries seem to stagnate at the middle-income level. The middle-income range is relatively common among contemporary emerging markets globally, so it is not surprising that ‘trap’ discussions focus on this income bracket. But middle income trap theory also holds some very valuable lessons for development policy more generally, at all income levels.
Two men carrying goods to be recycled ride their flatbed tricycles past a red Porsche Cayman parked outside a high-end housing complex in Beijing, China. (Photo: AAP).
The middle income trap is characterised by reform stagnation. This is arguably because the institutions that are helpful for reaching middle income can actually inhibit development to upper-income status. Examples of such institutions include limited exposure to volatile international capital flows, interest rate controls to shift savings from households to firms, and electoral institutions that favour incumbents and thus promote long-term planning.
These policies tend to assist with capital deepening, which is a relatively straightforward way to achieve middle-income status. Infrastructure development and urbanisation reduce transaction costs. Investments in factories and industry allow an economy to operate more efficiently through the sheer brunt of giving labour some capital to work with.
By the time countries reach middle-income status, the gains from better utilising labour inputs by simply providing them with more capital have run out. More must be done with fixed inputs by enhancing productivity. Among other things, this requires education to improve the quality of labour. Deregulating markets and opening them to foreign firms allows competition to end struggling firms and release their resources to more productive ones. And liberalising financial markets frees up capital so it can find the highest return in the most worthwhile investments.
Each of these reforms can involve overturning an institutional arrangement that was helpful in achieving middle income. This is part of why middle-income countries, like China today, are often described as needing a ‘new growth model’.
Middle-income countries find the transition to these new growth models doubly challenging because the institutional arrangements that helped them arrive at middle-income created vested interests who benefit from the status quo. These vested interests resist changes that would see them de-throned, even if it means the country as a whole would become more prosperous. If middle-income nations cannot uproot these vested interests, they fall into the trap and stagnate.
China provides an instructive example of a country at risk of the trap. Firms that have benefited from cheap access to credit thanks to financial repression, cheap labour thanks to wage repression for migrant workers as part of the Hukou system, and easy land acquisition thanks to state control of the legal architecture, are now resisting the transition to a more liberal, competitive and consumption-driven economy.
While middle-income countries can suffer acutely from the challenge of reforming in the face of vested interests, this challenge can be found at all income levels. At numerous points throughout a nation’s development, structural reforms must be made in order to advance. These reforms see new vested interests empowered and need to be challenged in turn in the next wave of reforms down the track.
For example, Australia engaged in a range of deep structural reforms during the Fraser, Hawke and Keating administrations. These included deregulating the financial sector, floating the dollar, massively reducing tariffs and instituting compulsory superannuation as part of broader reforms to industrial relations. This did away with vested interests in the farming and manufacturing sectors who were impeding the transition to a high-income economy. But these reforms in turn empowered new vested interests in the property, finance and mining industries that now block important structural reforms in taxation and carbon pricing. Is Australia in danger of an upper-income trap?
Japan certainly seems to be. Japan has dragged its feet on a suite of reforms since the beginning of the so-called lost decades. These include pensions, agricultural liberalisation, workplace practices, female labour force participation and the labour market. Despite the potential payoffs to these reforms and ongoing economic stagnation in Japan, the political apparatus has not responded vigorously. This is at least in part because these reforms would upset vested interests among the elderly, industrial conglomerates and the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, who rose to influence on the back of Japan’s growth model prior to the lost decades.
Across the advanced economies of Europe and in lower-income countries like India and the ASEAN nations, one hears of the need for ‘deep structural reform’. Macroeconomic painkillers in the form of fiscal and monetary stimulus have lost their effectiveness. Efforts must instead focus on long-festering microeconomic policies. Yet progress is slow because of the resistance of vested interests.
Clearly then, there is some sense in which ‘traps’ pertaining to institutional change and vested interests occur at multiple points along the development trajectory. The question for development studies is what factors predict success in reform efforts and what factors predict failure. And do these factors differ across income-levels, state structures and cultures? The identification of institutions that actively encourage reforms and entrench a virtuous cycle of institutional dynamism would be particularly useful.
Reforms as a theoretical concept and the parameters that govern a society’s ability to enact them have hitherto been under-studied in development science. The silver lining of the middle income trap’s contemporary salience is that it is bringing this issue to the fore.
Mark Fabian is a doctoral candidate in economics at the Crawford School for Public Policy, The Australian National University.
courtesy:www.eastasiaforum,org

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China’s curbs on domestic logging could worsen deforestation abroad


On International Forests Day, we publish analysis from Forest Trends on how China's domestic logging ban could drive deforestation elsewhere
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(Image by Forest Trends)
At first glance, China’s newly announced plans to expand bans on logging in its natural forests and to cut the country’s overall timber harvesting quotas may sound like good news for the environment. But when Forest Trends looked into the ramifications of some of the policies laid out in China’s new Five-Year Plan, here’s what we found:

This month, the Government of China released its
13th Five-Year Plan, which lays the foundation for the country’s development through 2020. This Five-Year Plan explicitly states that China aims for an environmentally and economically sustainable model for its future development. Kudos to the Chinese government for pursuing a sustainable long-term agenda, but that plan also poses problems at home and abroad that must be addressed. Namely, the vision for a greener China threatens to deal a deathblow to China’s declining domestic logging industry and, ironically, may end up exporting environmental damage to other, more vulnerable countries.

For more analysis, see the new Forest Trends brief China’s Logging Ban in Natural Forests: Impacts of Extended Policy at Home and Abroad.


China timber map 

The Five-Year Plan includes a logging quota for 2016-2020 that is 6.3% lower than China’s already-reduced domestic timber harvesting quota, and it provides for the expansion of an existing ban on all commercial logging in certain states in the northeast region, broadening it to include virtually all of China’s last remaining natural forests by 2017. Imposing this ban on a national scale is certain to impact the economy and environment of not only China, but other countries as well – in both favorable and detrimental ways:

  • Already, the logging ban has eliminated a significant source of domestic jobs and labour: Through 2014, natural forests provided over half of the country’s total domestic timber production and were essential to the broader forestry industry and its employees. To compensate for the ban’s adverse economic impact on the sector, the central government has allocated 2.35 billion yuan (about US$379 million) a year to cover foresters’ loss of livelihood between 2014 and 2020 – a major undertaking with yet-to-be-determined economic implications.
     
Ironically, the vision for a greener China may end up exporting environmental damage to other, more vulnerable countries.
 
  • The ban will also affect the availability of certain wood species for trade and manufacturing. While China’s ambitious plantation programs will continue to be able to make up for some of these shortages, specific species from natural forests can typically not be easily substituted from plantation areas. This is particularly true for some species that grow in northeastern China, including Mongolian oak, Chinese ash, and Korean pine – all valuable and commercially significant hardwood species that are particularly prized by flooring, furniture, and plywood industries.
  • That’s not to say that these commercially desirable species will be completely off limits in natural forests. While the ban may make it more difficult tolaunder wood through China’s market, some quantity will remain available through both legal and illegal channels, possibly undermining the ban’s purpose. One concerning loophole is thatnon-commercial logging is allowed as long as no more than 49.5 million m3 is harvested during the next five years – that covers forest management practices like “forest thinning” for the sake of tree growth and overall health. The caveat here is that in many countries, thinning has been regularly invoked as a pretense for more intensive logging. Add to that some additional volume of these wood species that’s bound to reach the market as a result of plain-old illegal logging.
  • The logging ban will likely also have ripple effects in other countries’ forests. As it is, imported timber accounts for more than half of China’s total timber supply. With the new logging ban in place, China is expected to fix its gaze abroad to meet domestic demand with even more imported timber. Already, evidence suggests that a large portion of the wood imports entering China are illegally sourced – particularly certain rosewood species from the Mekong region of Southeast Asia and, increasingly, from Africa. In addition, the limited availability of desirable species that plantations can’t supply could exacerbate the existing illegal logging issues in the Russian Far East, whose temperate forests border China’s and share many of the same species.  Intensifying the demand for these imports could inflict additional damage to already-vulnerable forests by making both legal and illegal channels to China more lucrative for international traders.
     
In essence, by protecting its own natural forests without diligently ensuring the legality of the wood it imports, China is simply “exporting” environmental harm — often to countries with poor governance and enforcement where regulations are routinely undermined. In order for China’s efforts to work towards a more sustainable future to be sustainable for the planet adequate protections against inadvertently promoting ecological damage elsewhere need to be in place and reinforced.
courtesy:chinadialogue

First BRICS bank loans spark debate over environmental protection


Civil society groups are concerned, despite New Development Bank’s approval of ‘green’ first loans. Robert Soutar reports
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The New Development Bank, set up by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa in 2014 approved its first batch of loans this week (Image by Kremilin.ru)
Instead of funding coal plants, oil refineries or roads that cut through pristine forests as some observers had feared, new southern-led infrastructure lender the New Development Bank (NDB or BRICS bank), has earmarked its first US$ 811 million batch of loans for renewable energy projects.

The NDB last week signed-off two main disbursements of US$300 million to Brazilian national development bank BNDES and US$250 million to India’s Canara bank to enhance renewable energy capacity. Shaktikanta Das, India’s economic affairs minister, described the loans as a “good start” on the way to proving the bank’s green credentials.

South African public utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd and China’s Shanghai Lingang Hongbo New Energy Development Co. will receive US$180 million and US$81 million respectively. The former will construct a new transmission line and the latter is set to add 100 megawatts of rooftop solar capacity. In the case of South Africa and China, funds will be administered by public finance ministries. The locations of the projects have not been disclosed.

NDB project funding has been the subject of intrigue and concern among civil society organisations (CSOs) since the bank’s formal launch in Fortaleza, Brazil, in 2014. Yet news of these first ‘green’ loans has done little to ease their fears.

The problem, CSOs say, is that since the NDB still lacks a proper social and environmental policy framework, it cannot safeguard against the adverse impacts of its projects – no matter how green they claim to be.

“How the bank defines ‘green’ is something the bank should clarify up front before issuing any finance,” says Katherine Lu, sustainable finance coordinator at 
Friends of the Earth US, adding that safeguards enable banks to assess the sustainability of projects and their potential impacts on society in a consistent manner.

“Without them, banks have no moral compass,” Lu told Diálogo Chino, noting that the bank lacks staff and processes to address public feedback.

“It is a red flag that the bank remains immature as a financial institution and may not yet be ready for the international stage,” Lu says.

Starting small

While the first projects would seem to have a low environmental impact, it is not clear whether NDB will continue to fund similar small-scale developments. There is nothing stipulated in the bank’s 
articles of agreement that rules out investment in bigger, potentially more damaging projects.

Lu doubts that these first loans are indicative of the NDB’s future funding plans since the bank’s remit is to support large infrastructure.

Caio Borges, a lawyer with Brazilian civil society group Conectas, says irrespective of a project’s size, safeguards reveal a bank’s commitment to listening and incorporating communities’ perspectives into the design and implementation of a project.

“The safeguard model is the bi-product of decades of civil society struggle to ensure that development finance institutions respect, protect and fulfil human rights,” Borges told Diálogo Chino.

Kevin Gallagher of Boston University’s Global Economic Governance Initiative says the NDB's use of green bonds to partly finance four projects has been an innovative approach.

“If the NDB can also devise state-of-the-art safeguards that enhance environmental sustainability and social inclusion without dragging down the project cycle it could become a truly new model for multilateral development banking,” Gallagher added.

'On-lending'

By lending through member countries’ national development banks (a process known as 
on-lending), NDB projects become subject to the rules of these banks on managing social and environmental risks.

For Borges, this does not circumvent the need for oversight from the NDB since rules in some member countries do not align with the highest international standards on human rights, transparency and accountability.

Even with safeguards, many of the major infrastructure works financed by national development banks have failed to adequately mitigate their impacts, adds Lu, pointing to Brazil’s controversial 
Belo Monte dam, funded by BNDES.

Washington rules?

While the NDB seems to be doing things differently compared with existing multilateral development banks, the other new China-led bank in town, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), is treading a more familiar path.

The AIIB, which will invest in infrastructure to support its One Belt, One Road initiative, also approved its first loans last week. The bank will fund a highway in Pakistan, an expressway connecting Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, to the Uzbek border, and a ring road in Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city. But in contrast to the NDB, the AIIB has incorporated safeguards into its policy framework.

The AIIB held a process of public consultation on its safeguards, which ended up more or less replicating those developed by the Washington-based finance institutions such as the World Bank. China holds a 30% vote and veto power within the AIIB. Therefore, Gallagher says, it is the NDB, in which BRICS member countries hold equal voting share, which currently offers the more interesting approach to multilateral development finance.  China is also a member of the BRICS bank.

Borges points out that, for better or worse, the World Bank is seen as the reference point for safeguards. However, he says Washington-based financial institutions’ imposition of harsh ‘structural adjustment’ policies on developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s as a condition of lending has translated into a perception the safeguard model also undermines democratic autonomy.

All the same, Borges says, both developed and developing countries should uphold the principles to which they have committed in the international sphere.

“Safeguards play a key role in making sure that development is made to the benefit of the people and in accordance with international human rights,” he says.Courtesy:chinadialogue

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Changzhou pollution scandal highlights holes in China’s environmental enforcement


Government promises crackdown and delivery of new soil pollution law after hundreds of Chinese children are poisoned by chemical waste, writes Zhang Chun
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Angry parents demonstrate outside the school blamed for illness in hundreds of children. The school was built close to a former fertiliser factory (Image by weibo)
For many Chinese, the country’s soil pollution crisis has become increasingly acute in recent weeks after several hundred children fell ill from attending a school built close to a former fertiliser factory.

Almost 500 students at the
Changzhou Foreign Languages School suffered symptoms such as skin inflammation, eczema and bronchitis after taking lessons at a school that had only been open for six months, raising questions about what the school authorities knew.

The school was built close to a former fertiliser factory site, and the 400 mu (266,700 square metres) dump had been owned by three chemical factories. Of these, the biggest was Changlong Chemicals, a fertiliser and pesticides company that had already been investigated for breaching environmental regulations. The company operated on the site for 50 years before relocating in 2009 and some of the chemicals detected at the school are extremely toxic.

A
Chinese Central Television report on April 17 brought the case to nationwide attention, prompting the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) and the provincial government to launch a joint investigation.

The school’s authorities initially responded by publishing an open letter accusing the media of exaggerating circumstances, but then cooperated with investigations and created a microsite to publish public updates.

The incident has given rise to comparisons with the Love Canal scandal in the US in the late  1970s, when residents of an industrial town near the Canadian border found that buried toxic waste has seeped into their homes and made many of them ill.

The Changzhou case is the latest in a spate of toxic soil scandals involving schools across China. In the last decade, four other serious incidences have emerged. The continued failure to clean up polluted sites, and a lack of public disclosure relating to the operation of chemical companies, has hampered progress.

The Changzhou school site has been passed on to shopping mall developers who have already started planting trees in the polluted soil.

The investigation

In order to get confirmation that their children had become ill through attending the school, parents of students called a third party company to
test the air and water at the site. They found heavy metals iron, chromium and arsenic in the soil, and organic pollutants such as acetone, benzene, toluene and dichloromethane in the air.

Chemical pollutants such as chlorobenzene and carbon tetrachloride were discovered in the soil and water at levels tens of thousands of times higher than those legally permitted.

Under pressure to respond to the scandal, the government started to monitor air, soil and water quality in and around the campus, after the school denied responsibility for the illnesses.

Six monitoring points have been set up on school grounds to collect air quality data, in addition to two more in Changzhou city itself which will provide comparative data. Initial data suggest nothing unusual about the air quality surrounding the school.

A team of medical experts say the school’s water meets national standards and food hygiene is adequate. Furthermore, attendance records show that there have been no outbreaks of infectious diseases at the school. At the time of writing, an official government investigation into the soil pollution was underway.

A recently published survey found that
80% of China’s agricultural land is polluted which will cost an estimated US$1 trillion to clean up. However, Chen Nengchang of the independent Guangdong Institute of Eco-environmental and Soil Sciences, said that survey may have been imprecise through its use of sampling.

Health risks

Luo Qian, a deputy pharmaceuticals researcher with the 
Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, told reporters that chlorobenzene – a chemical detected on the school site - “accumulates in the human body and will gradually damage the liver and kidneys and irritate the skin and mucous membranes.” While carbon tetrachloride – also detected – is toxic to embryos.

A number of experts, including Chen Tongbin, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geographical Sciences and Guo Biao, professor at Peking University’s School of Public Health, say that short term exposure to these pollutants is unlikely to cause cancer but may cause ‘sub-acute’ poisoning. Long term exposure means a higher risk of leukaemia and lymphatic cancer.

Instead of removing the soil, a new layer will simply be laid on top and the contaminated earth left to further pollute groundwater supplies, which critics say is indicative of the government’s failure to enforce accountability for the complicated task of soil remediation.

Weak oversight

Weak oversight has led to a number of chemical pollution incidents in China, some involving Changlong Chemicals. In 2015, over 10,000 tonnes of chemical waste was discovered under a pig farm in Jingjiang, about an hour’s drive from the Changzhou site and the company’s headquarters. Some of that waste was traced to Changlong. In late 2014, the provincial’s top court ordered six companies to pay a total of 
160 million yuan for polluting rivers – Changlong’s share of that sum was 85 million yuan.

During construction of the Songjiazhuang subway station in Beijing in 2004 three workers fell unconscious during excavation work. They learned that the site formerly belonged to a fertiliser factory and the polluted soil was later removed and incinerated.

similar incident in Wuhan, central China’s most populous city involved a fertiliser factory site in Heshan being sold to a developer which wasn’t made aware of the pollution issue.

When construction started in 2007 workers fell unconscious. The city had to refund the developer’s purchase and pay 120 million yuan in compensation.

Meanwhile, in Heshan,
a village in Hunan, it  was confirmed that 70% of land in the city was polluted to some extent, with 296,800 cubic meters of soil contaminated. Major pollutants included organic phosphorus and chlorine, with contamination extending to an average depth of 1.8 metres – and 9 metres in points. Experts estimated it would cost 280 million yuan to fully restore all sites in Heshan.

The new soil law

Three decades of urbanisation has seen China’s cities expand to surround fertiliser and chemical factories that were originally built far from human settlements. When land prices rise the factories relocate, leaving mounds of toxic earth behind them. Cleaning contaminated soil is a notoriously difficult, intensive and expensive process and cleaning up heavily polluted sites can take years, if not decades.

A lack of awareness surrounding the dangers of soil pollution, weak legislation and poor implementation where construction often starts before environmental impact assessments are approved, are holding back progress.

On April 25 Chen Jining, minister of environmental protection, said that a long-awaited action plan for dealing with soil pollution will be released and implemented this year, along with a detailed survey of soil pollution.

That survey is still under discussion but will focus on agricultural land use construction rather than industrial sites which remain neglected.

China’s efforts, which mirror the development of US Superfunds, should address the current environmental laws

What China has done to address soil pollution?

  • 2012 An MEP circular establishes guidelines for cleaning up brownfield land for redevelopment
  • 2014 Revisions to the1989 Environmental Protection Law strengthen penalties for polluters and enshrine the public’s right to access environmental data
  • 2015 Beijing pledges approximately US$450 million over the next three years to help 30 Chinese cities tackle heavy metal pollution
  • 2016 A 10-point soil action plan is drawn up
  • 2017 The national Soil Pollution Prevention and Control Law is expected to come into force
    courtesy:chinadialogue

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Russian gas to clean up China's air?

China is set to boost gas imports to help tackle air pollution, but risks inflicting environmental damage in sensitive regions including the Arctic
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Vladimir Putin is due to visit Beijing later in May to finalise a deal that could see more than 60 billion cubic metres of gas delivered to China (Image by Monika Flueckiger
After 15 years of talking about it, Russia is hoping China will sign a major gas contract this month that will deepen the two countries' energy cooperation. The push to finalise the deal comes at a critical time for both sides: China needs to decrease coal burning to improve air quality, while Russia needs new markets for its gas as Europe tries to reduce Russian exports amid the crisis in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, is due to visit China later in May to discuss the final terms of the agreement. If it goes ahead, the deal will follow another major contract finalised in December, which secured Chinese investment in Russia’s US$27 billion liquefied natural gas project on Yamal, a gas-rich peninsula in the Arctic.

The timing of these contracts make sense: China’s hunger for gas is expected to surge in coming years as the country attempts to wean itself off coal and improve air quality. Demand is forecast to grow to 420 billion cubic metres per year by 2020, up from 170 billion cubic metres last year, according to official Chinese estimates published in April.

The latest deal would likely include the annual delivery of 38 billion cubic metres of gas by an eastern pipeline route, and could be extended to include another 30 billion cubic metres of fuel, including liquefied natural gas (LNG), via a western route, according to Xia Yishan, director of energy strategy research at the China Institute of International Studies.

“There is the very serious factor of air pollution in China, and Chinese industry is hoping for a switch to gas to take the place of dirty coal energy,” said Xia at a video conference hosted by Russian and Chinese state media in late April. “So before China stands a very big task and challenge to correct the structure of energy use – to increase the use of natural gas.”

Pipeline controversies

Transporting large quantities of gas from Russia to China will require construction of major new infrastructure, long a bone of contention for environmentalists. Russian gas giant Gazprom’s plans to build a 2,600-kilometre pipeline to China through a world heritage site in the Altai Mountains, home to rare species like the snow leopard, prompted outrage around the world in 2012.


Gazprom's planned pipeline routes in eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East (Source: Gazprom)

Those plans appear to have been shelved, at least for now, after Gazprom turned its attention to an alternative route, announcing last year that a so-called eastern route – an alternative initially proposed by green NGOs – had become its priority. “Gazprom will go down the path blazed by environmentalists,” said Alexey Knizhnikov of WWF Russia.

However, Gazprom’s shift in approach seems to have had little to do with concern about impacts on a vulnerable ecosystem. The “undoubtedly positive” move to abandon the Altai route was “not due to any ecological considerations”, explained Andrey Shadurskiy, senior lecturer at the School of International Relations at St Petersburg State University, but because the route became uneconomical as compared to alternatives.

The eastern route now being pursued will draw gas from eastern Siberia to three different points for export to China, at the Russian cities Vladivostok, Dalnerechensk and Blagoveshchensk, according to Gazprom. A separate western route would see deliveries of LNG by sea, possibly from a new LNG project in Vladivostok, the construction of which is under discussion.

Meanwhile, gas deliveries from the Yamal project in the Arctic would be made by ships sailing along the Northern Sea Route. Under the terms of the contract agreed last autumn, China is bound to purchase 4 billion cubic metres of gas per year once the facility is in full operation, possibly by 2016.

The Yamal scheme too is fraught with environmental controversy, however. The Russian government lists the project, including construction of the deepwater port Sabetta, the drilling of hundreds of wells, and vast infrastructure for gas processing and liquefaction, among its top infrastructure priorities. But Russian NGOs have warned it could inflict severe damage on both the environment and native populations.

Concerns focus on the port. Planned for a shallow area of water, covered by ice nine months of the year, construction of the project and a year-round shipping lane would destroy an estuary of global significance and one of the most productive fish habitats off the Arctic coast, according to WWF Russia. Campaigners are calling for measures to be taken to protect vulnerable species, including relocation of the port to a less ecologically sensitive area.
courtesy:chinadialogue

What other cities can learn from London’s flawed congestion charge


Several Chinese cities are weighing up different types of congestion charging to combat smog and alleviate traffic snarl ups. Dave Hill asks what experience can they can draw from London's efforts


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Road markings for London's congestion charge, a policy that has had mixed environmental results. Pic: Scott Barron
When London mayor Ken Livingstone introduced congestion charging to the British capital in February 2003, his arguments for it were economic. “Red Ken”, as he’d become known for his left-wing politics, was concerned that traffic jams were bad for capitalism.
His aims were to reduce valuable time lost as a result of traffic jams and create a more hospitable atmosphere for pedestrians – shoppers, workers and visitors – by relieving motorists of £5 each time they entered a central charging zone covering the Square Mile financial district and the West End shopping and tourist areas.

Despite dire predictions, in terms of reducing traffic, the system worked in the early years of its operation.
Livingstone joked that he’d got the idea from Milton Friedman, the “Chicago School” free market economist admired by Margaret Thatcher.
In 2007 he doubled the size of the charging zone by adding a western extension to it (the WEZ). But when he went into his third election campaign the following year, his congestion charge case had also become environmental.
Livingstone had plans to slap an extra high charge on “gas guzzlers” – high-powered private vehicles with high fuel consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. By contrast, cars with the lowest CO2 output might be exempt from the charge completely.    

Alas for Livingstone, he lost the 2008 mayoral election. His successor, Boris Johnson dumped the gas-guzzler plan, abolished the WEZ and, alas for London, will leave both the capital’s air quality and its congestion levels in an unhealthy state when he steps down as mayor in May.
Last year, a study conducted for him and the capital’s transport body Transport for London (TfL) by King’s College researchers suggested that nearly 9,500 Londoners a year now die early from air pollution, mainly due to a rise in victims of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) belched out by diesel vehicles. Meanwhile, road congestion is hitting record levels.

Critics of Johnson's environmental record have tied the issues of pollution and congestion together and point the finger of blame squarely at the London mayor, who is expected to bid for leadership of the Conservative Party before the next general election in 2020.
They may have a point. Yet London’s experience shows that the relationship between congestion charging and environmental ills is not straightforward.
Johnson had argued that Livingstone’s anti-gas-guzzler plan would have made only a marginal difference to carbon emissions, for example. Idiosyncratically, he compared the additional CO2 produced by what he called “family cars” to be equivalent to that blown out by a herd of cows tramping through the West End.
Meanwhile, TfL’s annual assessments of the charge’s effects have taken a cautious view of the charge’s effects on air quality
In 2003, TFL's first annual assessment of its impacts as a whole anticipated only “minimal” effects on visual, noise or atmospheric pollution within the charging zone and noted some concern that pollution might increase around its boundaries.
The sixth and final annual report, published in July 2008, said that a reduced volume of traffic circulating more efficiently in the charging zone had directly produced an estimated 8% reduction in oxides of nitrogen (NOx), a 7% fall in fine particulate matter (PM10) and a 16% drop in CO2 emissions.

However, the reductions were said to have diminished because congestion levels had begun to rise again.
The report also said that overall air quality trends had “continued to primarily reflect the diversity and dominance of external factors” and as such “did not allow the identification of a clear ‘congestion charging effect.’”
Later studies found that congestion charging had probably been beneficial to health but concluded, in the words of an academic from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, that its impact on air pollution and life expectancy had been “modest”.

In fact, transport-related air pollution, blamed for about half the total amount, were already addressed more directly through other initiatives aimed at road-users.
In February 2008, Livingstone had introduced the Low Emission Zone (LEZ) which covered almost the whole of Greater London, an area of around 600 square miles, rather than just the centre of the city and unlike the congestion charge, operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
It sought to cut the amount of particulates – tiny particles of soot harmful to the lungs – churned out from the exhausts of heavy commercial diesel vehicles, and to help the mayor meet European Union air quality targets, for which London was falling short.

Aimed initially at lorries, coaches, minibuses and large vans, it charged registered vehicles that didn’t meet the required standard £200 a day, and fined drivers of unregistered ones £1000.
The LEZ was retained by Johnson and he tightened the regulations soon after his election to include more types of vehicle. He exasperated campaigners and opponents by initially delaying a third phase on the grounds that it would hit small business people using small vans at a time of economic recession, but then took a U-turn to avoid an EU fine.

Pollution spikes
And yet, despite the LEZ, London’s air quality continues to cause grave concern. Levels in some hotspots are double or treble permitted EU levels in recent years. According to measurements made in some of London’s monitoring points, NO2 limits for the whole of 2016 were exceeded within the year’s first eight days.
At the risk of hyperbole, Simon Birkett of the Clean Air in London campaign has called diesel exhaust “the biggest public health catastrophe since the Black Death.” 

Johnson has defended his record on air quality, describing London as a trailblazer on the issue. He has increased the number of low emission buses in London’s 8,600-strong fleet to around 1,500 and points to a new Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) currently scheduled to come into force in September 2020.
This will require all vehicles travelling in the congestion charge zone to conform to new, higher EU standards. Johnson’s plan also includes financial encouragement for more drivers of London’s famous black taxi cabs to undergo a green upgrade and get away from diesel.

Mayoral candidates
Too little, too late, say Johnson's critics, who include the Labour Party’s Sadiq Khan, the frontrunner to become mayor after May’s election .
Khan’s manifesto promises to consult on bringing the ULEZ forward and expanding it. His main rival, Johnson’s fellow Conservative Zac Goldsmith, a noted fan of electric vehicles, has promised only to “back” the ULEZ. Goldsmith, a former editor of the Ecologist Magazine, has also stated his support for “tougher rules for heavy goods vehicles and vans.” But these are not yet specified in his manifesto.

Significantly, neither is pledging to either increase the congestion charge – which is now roughly double what it was initially - or enlarge the charging zone. That is an indication of how politicians continue to fear the displeasure of motorists, even though car ownership in London has been falling. That concern also informs steps to penalise or restrict dirty vehicles. It's a prickly problem that London’s politicians will have to grasp.

Political will
At an air quality conference held by the capital’s 33 local authorities in 2014, two basic remedies were underlined: switching from diesel to clean fuel, which included petrol; and reducing vehicle weights and speeds to lessen particulates caused by road surface friction.
A map was produced showing the difference in air quality in two of London’s most famous shopping streets on the same day. In Oxford Street, it was filthy. In neighbouring Regent Street it was strikingly cleaner. The reason was that Regent Street had been closed to traffic for the day.

The lesson from London appears to be that radically lessening air pollution requires motorised road traffic to be slower, lighter, smoother and cleaner. Congestion charging can help with that, but really serious progress requires a great deal more – and the political will to supply it.
courtesy:chinadialogue