Web Site Tracks China's Pollution Levels

BEIJING, Dec. 18, 2007 — -- An environmental group in China is seeking to unleash the power of the Internet in its campaign against the country's major polluters.

The nongovernmental Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPEA) unveiled a Web site last week that provides information about air pollution in China and the environmental record of factories and power plants.

According to Ma Jun, the director of the Beijing-based IPEA, the aim of the Chinese-language Web site is to make information about air quality easily accessible to the public and to make companies in China accountable for their environmental behavior.

The launch of the site highlights the push by Chinese environmentalists to put pressure on major polluters in the country, which is expected to soon overtake the United States as the world's largest carbon emitter.

"Information is a powerful tool," Ma said at a recent news conference. "Access to information is a precondition for public participation."

The China Air Pollution Map (http://air.ipe.org.cn) site is a public database containing air pollution data published by local and central environmental offices and media reports of official environmental reports since 2004.

It maps the locations of more than 4,200 factories that have violated the country's air emission standards during the last four years, including 40 operated by multinational companies jointly with Chinese firms. Among the biggest air polluters identified in the map are 300 power plants around the country.

The database also provides information about the air quality, sources of air pollution and waste water discharge in 15 provinces and 150 cities in southern China, including Hong Kong.

It shows the ranking of these Chinese provinces and cities based on their air quality. The country's leading export producers, Jiangsu in east China and Guangdong in south China, were listed as the top sources of industrial emissions among the 15 provinces. Wuhan in central China and Nanjing in east China were the most polluted cities on the list, based on the government's air pollution index.