China's new air pollution plan injects momentum into cleaning the air and reducing coal use

Editor's note: Lauri Myllyvirta is the lead analyst and co-founder of Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of CGTN.

China's State Council recently released a new national air quality action plan, attempting to inject new momentum into China's clean air efforts. The first national plan in 2013 turned the corner in China's air pollution fight and delivered dramatic reductions in the levels of health-harming smog across the country. The new action plan aims to continue this success story.

China achieved very impressive improvements in air quality from 2013 to 2020, with average concentrations of PM2.5, the air pollutant with the most severe public health impacts, across the country falling 50 percent. Given that exposure to PM2.5 was estimated to contribute to 850,000 deaths in 2017, the reduction in pollution levels has had enormous public health and economic benefits. 

Since 2021, it seemed that air quality improvements might have petered out, as PM2.5 pollution levels fell only marginally in 2022 and have rebounded by 3.7 percent in 2023, making this year likely the first year since the beginning of the national air pollution plans when average pollution levels increase year-on-year.

The period from 2021 to 2023 has seen a significant increase in fossil fuel consumption, with the pandemic and economic headwinds the government's main focus.

The concentrations of another dangerous pollutant, ground-level ozone, have been stubbornly high, increasing 3 percent from 2015 to 2020 and 4 percent from 2020 to 2022.

There is still a lot of work to do. Out of the 30 provincial capital cities in the Chinese mainland, 12 don't meet the country's national air quality standards for PM2.5 yet, based on the average pollutant concentrations during the past 12 months, and 12 don't meet the standards for ozone.

Targets

The plan targets a 10 percent reduction in PM2.5 concentrations from 2020 to 2025 across all 339 cities. The total number of heavy pollution days should fall below 1 percent, from 1.2 percent in 2020, but requiring no improvement from 2022.

A more ambitious reduction of 20 percent is targeted in Beijing and the surrounding provinces from 2020 to 2025. This means a 7 percent reduction in the next two years, given improvements that already took place from 2020 to 2023. A 15 percent cut is targeted in the Fenwei plain surrounding Xi'an, with 11 percent left to do in the next two years. 

Beijing's PM2.5 pollution level is targeted to fall below 32 ug/m3 by 2025. This is notably a target lower than China's national air quality standard of 35 ug/m3, indicating that compliance with the current national standard isn't seen as sufficient anymore. There is certainly a strong reason to aim for lower levels: the WHO revised its guideline from 10 to 5 ug/m3 in 2021.

The Yangtze River Delta region around Shanghai gets a less ambitious target of complying with the national air quality standard of 35 ug/m3. The average concentration in the region was 29 ug/m3 in 2022, so this target doesn't require improvements in most cities.

Key regions for air pollution control

One of the essential breakthroughs of China's first national action plan in 2013 was designating air pollution "key regions" covering large areas around the country's most important cities, such as Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. These cities are surrounded by vast industrial belts where China's coal-burning power plants and industries are concentrated, and addressing pollution from these surrounding areas is necessary if the regions are going to see clean air.

The new plan adjusts the list of cities included as focus areas for the plan, known as air pollution "key regions." New cities with relatively high pollution levels in southern Shandong and Hebei are added, making the control regions more contiguous, and cities that have met national air quality standards for several years are removed, particularly in southern Yangtze River Delta. The total number of cities included in the key regions increases from 80 to 82.

Home to 500 million people, the new key control regions have 37 percent of China's operating coal power capacity and 54 percent of operating steelmaking capacity. They also have a significant amount of new coal power and steel capacity under construction, representing 26 percent and 41 percent of the national total, showing the need to close down older capacity to decrease total capacity and total coal consumption.

The regions cover significant parts of the provinces of Shandong, Jiangsu, Hebei and Shanxi, which are among the largest coal consumers among China's provinces. For them, reducing coal use requires a shift in their economic structure to replace coal-dependent industries.

How are the air quality improvements going to be achieved?

The other key breakthrough in 2013 was directly targeting reductions in coal-burning, the largest source of air pollutant emissions. Setting targets to reduce coal use in the key regions in absolute terms, not just as a share of the energy mix, was a radical step ten years ago, before China had even set the target for peaking CO2 emissions.

The new action plan re-introduces targets to reduce coal use, showing that this remains a key measure to drive down air pollution. The Beijing region has to achieve a 10 percent reduction in coal consumption from 2020 to 2025. The Yangtze River Delta region should cut coal consumption by 5 percent while the Fenwei plain region should achieve negative growth, with a focus on reducing coal use outside the power sector. 

Thermal power generation, the largest use of coal, increased by 2 percent, 17 percent and 23 percent in the provinces included in the Beijing, Yangtze and Fenwei regions, respectively, from 2020 to the most recent 12 months, showing that meeting the coal consumption reduction targets requires real action.

The steel industry, as the other major air pollutant-emitting sector along with coal power, is a major focus. More than 80 percent of production capacity nationwide and all capacity in the key air pollution control regions is supposed to complete strict emission control retrofits by 2025. The share of electric arc furnace steelmaking should rise to 15 percent. This is a key way to reduce emissions and start the low-carbon transformation in the steel industry.

The plan includes a new push to eliminate small-scale coal use in households, industry and services. These policies have been a key driver of China's air quality improvements in the past, along with strict air emissions standards for power plants and large scale industry.

A key question is how the small-scale coal use in the key regions is replaced. The air quality plan calls for promoting both electricity and gas as replacements. Replacement of coal with gas has been important in the past and can be done with relatively low initial investment. However, gas is still a fossil fuel and its prices have been very volatile. Recent energy security concerns prompted the NDRC to call for "strictly controlling" projects to shift from coal to gas. Shifting to electric heating using heat pumps requires more upfront investment, but entails lower operating costs. As electricity generation is cleaned up, solutions relying on electricity enable emission-free heating.

Coal use in the key regions can also be reduced by shifting to more imports of electricity, steel and other energy-intensive commodities from other provinces. Clearly, replacing local coal use with clean energy and clean production yields larger benefits on the national level.

The plan also introduces new, measurable targets for the transportation sector. The share of electric and other "new energy" vehicles in new buses, taxis and other public vehicle fleets should reach 80 percent. The coverage of fast charging stations in the air pollution key regions should reach 80 percent along highways and 60 percent in other areas.

Railway freight volumes are targeted to increase by 10 percent and waterway by 12 percent respectively compared with 2020, with 90 percent of coal from key coal mining provinces transported on rail. In the air pollution key regions and in Guangdong Greater Bay area, 80 percent of other bulk cargo should be transported using rail and other clean methods.

A remaining challenge that this plan doesn't yet tackle head on is reducing ground-level ozone concentrations, which have been rising and standing out more as an air quality and public health issue as PM2.5 pollution levels have fallen. The plan sets targets to reduce VOC and NOx emissions, but the targeted reductions might not be sufficient to bring down ozone levels given the complex chemistry of ozone formation. The government hasn't yet set targets to reduce ozone concentrations, but will presumably do so once they are confident in their ability to deliver those reductions.

Learnings for other countries?

Despite remaining challenges, China's progress in rapidly cleaning up the country's air over the past decade is an unprecedented success story. Is there something to learn for other countries struggling with bad air quality?

Some aspects of China's air pollution action are based on features of the country's system of governance that are not replicable elsewhere. One example is using the Communist Party's internal promotion system for provincial and local policymakers to give them a strong incentive to improve air quality.

However, there are several key things that China has gotten right that are applicable anywhere. In the early 2010s, the country managed to create a comprehensive and reliable system for air pollution monitoring and emissions reporting covering the entire country, making it possible to track progress and hold policymakers accountable. This included even making real-time emission data from individual power plants and factories available online.

China set clear targets and timelines for air quality improvement, with annual and five-year targets and continuous evaluation keeping officials busy.

The national and regional air pollution action plans targeted all key emitting sectors, not just one or two, and targeted all main pollutants contributing to PM2.5 formation: particulate matter, SO2 and NOx.

The creation of key control regions that included both major urban centers and their surrounding areas made it possible to tackle large emission sources even hundreds of kilometers away, while tying the control of those industrial emissions to the air quality in iconic cities.

The creation of strong emission standards for power plants, industry and transportation delivered the largest emission reductions. Besides setting the standards on paper, achieving the real-world impact required dramatic improvements to China's environmental governance and enforcement, which had earlier been major impediments to progress. The government began routinely issuing fines to power plants and industries violating the air pollutant emission standards, instead of relying only on intermittent inspections.

With 99 percent of the world's population living in areas where the air is not safe, according to the WHO, there is a need for many more success stories around the world.

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