Beijing blocks pollution cost
report By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - The pollution cost tally is
becoming a potentially explosive political issue
in China.
In a throwback to the early
1990s when the authorities suppressed publication
of pollution indices for fear of inciting public
unrest, the government is now concerned that the
release of a study adding up the cost of the
nation's environmental damage could provoke social
backlash.
The calculation of China's
"green GDP" (gross domestic product) - a project
that attempts to compute the environmental cost of the
country's economic success -
has been put on hold indefinitely, with one of its
chief designers admitting he worries that the
project will be scrapped altogether.
"In
the current sensitive climate when everybody is
talking about 'green change', some provinces fear
publicizing their revised [green] GDP figures,"
Wang Jinnan, one of the heads of the project at
the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning,
said this week. "Some local governments have
lobbied us and tried to put pressure on us not to
make the green GDP report public."
Last
year, the combined efforts of China's
environmental watchdog and the National Bureau of
Statistics (NBS) produced a study estimating the
cost of environmental degradation in relation to
the country's GDP. According to the report,
environmental degradation in 2004 cost China some
US$64 billion, or 3.05% of its GDP.
The
new report for 2005, which was completed at the
end of last year but was never made public,
reveals "losses from pollution and reduction in
the GDP indicator even higher than the 2004
report", the Beijing News said this week, citing
interviews with experts involved in the report.
What is more, the study would have
presented a detailed picture for pollution and GDP
losses for each province, thus assigning
responsibility for environmental degradation to
individual localities.
The report's public
release, however, has now been "postponed
indefinitely", according to Wang, after a
six-month battle between the State Environmental
Protection Administration and the NBS.
"There exist major differences between the
environmental-protection agency and the
statistical bureau regarding the content of the
report and its distribution," Wang told the
Beijing News. "Without the support of the
statistics bureau, though, I fear for the future
of our project."
What the statisticians
worry about, said Wang, is unfavorable reaction
from provincial governments. Despite the onset of
new "green thinking" in the country, local
officials in China are still officially judged by
their abilities to deliver fast economic growth,
and fear that the pollution data would hurt their
performance assessments.
Defending the
decision to withhold the report, NBS chief Xie
Fuzhan said in July that there was no
internationally accepted standard for putting a
price on pollution cost. He told a press
conference that China was pioneering an effort
never attempted officially by another government.
"Come back to me only if you can find any
other country in the world that accepts the 'green
GDP' concept," Xie told reporters.
But
Chinese environmental experts are fighting back.
They argue that most developed nations already
have legal restraints and electoral checks and
balances that make the "green GDP" concept
unnecessary. In China's bureaucracy, though, the
only way to ensure environmental preservation
would be to include pollution control in the
provincial-level performance assessments.
"Calculating the country's 'green GDP' is
the cheapest and probably most feasible way for
China to reform the current dominant thinking
about officials' performance," said independent
environmental scholar Ma Jun.
The current
bureaucratic battle illustrates the rising social
stakes in China's steady emergence as an economic
powerhouse. It may soon surpass Germany as the
world's third-biggest national economy, but both
domestic and international environmental experts
are warning of the rising environmental toll of
this success.
The nation's smog-choked
cities and filthy waterways are making many people
ill and fueling a cycle of unrest in China that is
putting the world's fastest-growing economy in
peril, said the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development in a July review
requested by the Chinese government.
The
OECD study was supported by an earlier World Bank
report, which said that by 2020, China is looking
at 60,000 premature deaths per year in its cities.
Apart from that, it predicted that another 20
million people will suffer pollution-related
respiratory illnesses. Those figures add up to 13%
of the GDP in the total cost to public health,
according to the OECD.
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