Environmental Policy and Air Pollution in China

Governance and Strategy

Yuan Xu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429838842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This book systematically analyzes how and why China has expectedly lost and then surprisingly gained ground in the quest to solve the complicated environmental problem of air pollution over the past two decades.

Yuan Xu shines a light on how China's sulfur dioxide emissions rose quickly in tandem with rapid economic growth but then dropped to a level not seen for at least four decades. Despite this favorable mitigation outcome, Xu details how this stemmed from a litany of policy stumbles within the Chinese context of no democracy and a lack of sound rule of law. Throughout this book, the author examines China's environmental governance and strategy and how they shape environmental policy. The chapters weave together a goal-centered governance model that China has adopted of centralized goal setting, decentralized goal attainment, decentralized policy making and implementation. Xu concludes that this model provides compelling evidence that China's worst environmental years reside in the past.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese environmental policy and governance, air pollution, climate change and sustainable development, as well as practitioners and policy makers working in these fields.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429452154, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

1 China’s environmental crises

China faces colossal, multifaceted environmental challenges, many at crisis levels. Its environmental degradation has been widely documented and analyzed in academic studies as well as in public media. China is now the largest energy consumer, supplier and emitter of most major air and water pollutants as well as various greenhouse gases. Together with its geographically high population and economic densities, especially in the eastern half of the country, China was categorized at the very bottom of air quality among the 180 countries and regions in the Environmental Performance Index (Wendling et al., 2018; Figure 1.1). Few readers would be surprised to know that China’s air quality is among the most polluted in the world (Figure 1.1).

Air and water pollution in China have certainly taken a serious toll. China has made steady progress in the past decades to significantly reduce premature deaths due to water-related environmental factors and indoor air pollution, but ambient particulate matter (PM) pollution has been deteriorating. The Global Burden of Disease study elaborates in great detail the causes and risk factors of deaths across individual countries (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2018). In 1990, China accounted for 22.2% of the global population, and in 2017, the share dropped to 18.5% despite an 18.0% increase in absolute population (Figure 1.2). In premature deaths that are due to environmental risk factors, China’s share in the world in 1990 was 29.2% for household air pollution from solid fuels and 4.6% for unsafe water, sanitation and handwashing. In other words, an average Chinese was 31.5% more likely and 79.3% less likely to die prematurely due to the two risks than an average person in the world. The shares were significantly reduced to 16.5% and 0.6% in 2017, respectively, to make an average Chinese 10.6% and 96.8% less likely to die prematurely. In absolute terms, they were reduced by 65.7% and 92.5%, respectively. However, ambient PM pollution caused 404,000 premature deaths in 1990 and 852,000 in 2017, more than double. Its global share climbed from 23.0% to 29.0% over the period. In 2000, indoor air pollution was overtaken by ambient PM pollution in causing more premature deaths. In comparison to China’s share of the global population, in 1990, an average Chinese faced only a slightly greater risk, 3.8%, from ambient PM pollution than an average person in the world, but in 2017, the risk premium was enlarged to 56.9%.

Figure 1.1 Environmental Performance Index in the baseline year

Source: Wendling et al. (2018).

Note: “Air pollution” at the x-axis refers to sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and nitrogen oxide (NO_x) emission intensities, and its baseline year is 2006. “Air quality” in the y-axis indicates household solid fuels (baseline year: 2005), fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) exposure and PM_2.5 exceedance (baseline year: 2008).

Figure 1.2 China’s premature deaths due to air and water pollution in the Global Burden of Disease study

Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (2018).

Note: Solid lines indicate absolute numbers in persons with the left y-axis, while dashed lines refer to China’s shares in the world with the right y-axis.

Another measurement of pollution’s health impact is the disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) that quantifies the loss of “healthy” life years. It combines the lost life years due to both premature deaths and illnesses. Various types of environmental pollution in different countries may cause premature deaths and illnesses that correspond to different life expectancies, ages and other situations. The ratio between DALYs and premature deaths is much higher for water pollution than for air pollution. For example, in 2017, China lost 19.8 million, 6.46 million and 0.85 million DALYs due to ambient PM pollution, household air pollution from solid fuels, and unsafe water, sanitation and handwashing, respectively. The corresponding ratios between DALYs and premature deaths were 23.3, 23.8 and 89.0, respectively, to indicate the more severe health impacts of water pollution for an average case.

Nevertheless, the indicator of DALYs does not change the conclusion that was presented with the examination of premature deaths (Figure 1.3). Substantial progress was also made on indoor air pollution and water, with their DALYs being reduced by 77.3% and 92.0%, while the deterioration trend for ambient PM pollution is distinguished with an increase of DALYs by 47.3%. In terms of China’s shares in the world, ambient PM pollution is still the only risk factor among the three to surpass that of its population, which accounted for 23.8% of the world’s total in 2017. For all DALYs due to the three environmental risk factors, ambient PM pollution’s share rose from 25.6% in 1990 to 73.0% in 2017. Accordingly, environmental pollution in China is more and more dominated by ambient air pollution and especially PM pollution.

Figure 1.3 Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) in China due to air and water pollution in the Global Burden of Disease study

Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (2018).

On average, the DALYs due to various environmental risks indicate that an average Chinese loses a significant number of healthy life days for every year living in these environmental risks. In 1990, household air pollution from solid fuels was the most severe environmental risk in China to incur the loss of 8.7 disability-adjusted life days (DALDs) per person, while the damages from ambient PM pollution and from unsafe water, sanitation and handwashing were similar at 4.1 and 3.2 DALDs per person, respectively (Figure 1.4). In other words, an average Chinese lost 16.0 health life days due to the three air and water pollution risk factors for living through 1990. In 2017, ambient PM pollution became the most severe risk factor, being responsible for 5.1 DALDs per person or 1.0 DALDs more, after the other two experienced dramatic improvement in the past decades. The total loss was 7.0 DALDs for living through 2017.

China is not a unique country to witness the diverging progress of different risk factors. India had similar paths for distinguishing the rising importance of ambient PM pollution in environmental protection. Ambient PM pollution in India has remained stable throughout the years to account for 5.7 and 5.6 DALDs per person in 1990 and 2017, respectively. Although household air pollution from solid fuels still claimed greater health damages in 2017, its steady declining trend suggests that ambient PM pollution will soon become the most damaging environmental risk among the three in India as well (Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4 DALYs in days (or disability-adjusted life days [DALDs]) per person per year in China and India

Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (2018).

2 China’s expected rise of SO₂ emissions and unexpected success in SO₂ mitigation

China has been rapidly industrializing in the past four decades. Environmental crises can be empirically expected in the contexts of its rapid economic development, rising energy consumption and coal dominance. The expectation also comes from crucial governance factors that are believed to be favorable for environmental transition but that China is especially weak at. First, democracy is believed to be good for environmental protection by many scholars (e.g., Payne, 1995). Unfortunately, China is not a democracy, and thus, society’s demand for cleaner air is often not believed to be able to effectively influence policy making as in a democracy. It is generally ranked at the bottom of various democracy indexes. According to Polity’s ratings that can reflect the common views of democracy evaluation at least in Western liberal democracies, modern-day China, under the communist rule, is debatably less democratic than the imperial days in the 19th-century Qing dynasty, when the emperors still held absolute power, with the Polity index being −6 (Marshall et al., 2019). China’s economic reform era after the Cultural Revolution only slightly improved its Polity index from −8 to −7 (Figure 1.5). In comparison, South Korea was fundamentally transformed from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one after the reform in the 1980s. Singapore is steadily ranked toward the authoritarian side. India and the United States are standard democracies despite slight fluctuations.

Figure 1.5 Polity Democracy Index for China, South Korea, Singapore, India and the United States (−10 being the most autocratic and 10 the most democratic)

Source: Marshall et al. (2019).

Democratic states are argued to be more responsive to the public’s demands. If the public in a democracy gives top priority to environmental matters, strong political will is more likely to be generated (Li and Reuveny, 2006; Payne, 1995; Downey and Strife, 2010). Furthermore, the public in a democracy could be more pro-environment than are the elites in an autocracy; this could be because of better access to information, a more developed civil society and a longer time horizon of planning (Li and Reuveny, 2006; Payne, 1995). Democracy is generally closely associated with the rule of law, and therefore, there should be better enforcement of environmental regulations (Li and Reuveny, 2006). Nevertheless, democracy might also be associated with weakness in environmental protection. People’s self-interest and the interests of business are more difficult to overcome in a democracy (Li and Reuveny, 2006). If the public gives only a low priority to having a clean environment, then a democracy could be less likely to heavily focus on environmental protection.

Empirical statistical studies have found no conclusive relationship between democracy and the environment. Congleton (1992) and Neumayer (2002) found that democracy contributes positively to international environmental commitments. Midlarsky (1998) discovered that democracy leads to more protected areas of land, but that it tends to negatively influence deforestation and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions per capita. Winslow (2005) found only good effects of democracy, whereas Pellegrini and Gerlagh (2006) found that it had i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Political will
• 3 Environmental governance
• 4 Mobilizing the government
• 5 Policy making
• 6 Policy implementation
• 7 Environmental technology and industry
• 8 Goal-centered governance
• Index