Nation leads regional fight to improve air quality

Sharing ideas

In November, Chinese experts were asked to speak about the country's air pollution control efforts with senior officials in Punjab via an online meeting. However, the Punjab government was still eager to arrange a field visit for them for more exchanges, Chu said.

During their stay in Pakistan, the Chinese team had exchanges with nine departments and visited industrial enterprises. They also met Mohsin Raza Naqvi, Punjab's caretaker chief minister.

Chu said Punjab has great potential to tap end-of-pipe pollution control, an approach that concentrates on effluent treatment or filtration before waste discharges into the environment. The province, for example, has not yet taken adequate measures to control sulfur dioxide emissions, Chu said.

In another example of a fruitful exchange, the research academy was visited by a group of 85 military officers from across the globe on Jan 19 who were visiting China to take part in a workshop. Zhang Mengheng, director of CRAES' International Cooperation Center, said one of the topics that interested the officers the most was Beijing's air quality management.

"Some officers said they had heard a lot about the severe air pollution in Beijing before they came to the capital city," she recalled. "They said it was beyond their expectations when they saw blue skies instead of smog and they were curious about how China managed to make this happen."

The session at the academy was scheduled to run for two hours but was extended by 30 minutes as officers kept raising questions, Zhang said. Many of the officers asked for copies of the PowerPoint presentation the academy had prepared for a lecture, which focused on China's practices and progress in environmental protection.

"China's experiences can provide useful references for other developing countries as they are at a development stage China has just gone through," Zhang said.

She added that China's experiences should be localized in other developing nations so they cater to the actual needs and conditions of those countries.

However, Zhang also believes it's relatively easy for Chinese scientists to localize the nation's solutions on air pollution control in other countries given their vast experience in coping with the problem.

"While promoting the Beautiful China Initiative, China has also called for building a global community of shared future. So we are willing to share our experiences with the international community," she said.