Local government officials who fail to achieve their annual airborne pollution reduction targets may be criticized directly by top leaders, under an assessment method released by the central government. Zhai Qing, Vice Minister of Environmental Protection, said that beginning this year, assessment of officials for their anti-pollution efforts will be divided into two parts. Their performance on air quality improvement will account for half of the assessment marks given during annual appraisals. The targets are included in the Airborne Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan (2013-17) unveiled on September 12. The plan sets out goals for 338 cities for a marked improvement in air quality over five years. Under the plan, for the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei regional cluster, concentration levels of PM2.5 must be cut by 25% by 2017 from the 2012 level. The target for the Yangtze River Delta region is a reduction of 20%, and for the Pearl River Delta region, 15%. The concentration levels of PM10 must fall by at least 10% for the rest of the country. The other half of the marks on appraisals will be based on the local governments’ measures to reduce air pollution, such as managing pollution from industries and motor vehicles. There are four categories for the appraisals: excellent, fairly good, pass and fail. The method can measure local governments’ overall efforts to deal with airborne pollution on a yearly basis and is not simply results-driven, said Chai Fahe, Vice President of the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences. In 2018, the officials’ work in the past five years will be assessed comprehensively. If air quality targets for 2017 are not met, the officials will fail the appraisal no matter how many measures they have taken to improve air quality.

The air in China contains much more fine metallic particles than in the United States, according to scientists studying samples of air pollutants collected across the country, including Hong Kong. The city’s overall PM2.5 levels are lower than in most urban centers on the mainland, but it has a higher concentration of health-threatening trace metals, the scientists say. Nearly 20% of PM2.5 particle samples collected in the city carried metals such as zinc, a hazardous element that can permanently damage DNA. Scientists say it is not only the level of PM2.5 that matters, but also the particles’ composition. Excessive amounts of zinc and chromium are toxic and can lead to a wide range of problems, from premature ageing to cancer. Scientists warn that without tighter environmental regulations, high trace metal levels could lead to a public health crisis. Li Weijun, Professor of Environmental Science at Shandong University in Jinan, said: “While the general level of PM2.5 in China is five or six times higher than in the U.S., the amount of trace metals could be 10 or even 20 times higher.” Since 2003, Li and his team have built what is probably the largest data bank of airborne particles in China. He said most of the PM2.5 pollution in Hong Kong could have come from power plants and factories in the Pearl River Delta. Metals or hazardous elements found in China’s air included iron, zinc, copper, magnesium, lithium, nickel, cobalt, arsenic and selenium. With the help of oxygen, zinc can damage the structure of the DNA inside cells. Li said the findings show China is in urgent need of tighter and more effective environmental regulations, the South China Morning Post reports.

Only three of China’s 74 major cities met state pollution standards last year, according to the 2013 China Environmental Situation Report. Haikou, Zhoushan and Lhasa were the least polluted while Beijing, Tianjin and cities in Hebei province were the worst. Of the 10 cities that suffered the most serious problems, seven were in Hebei, including the worst three – Xingtai, Shijiazhuang and Handan. Beijing residents breathed “good” air on just 175 days last year. In Shanghai, environmental authorities said the city had 241 “good” days. Li Ganjie, Vice Minister of Environmental Protection, quoted the report as saying that although China’s environment had improved in general, water quality is “not optimistic” and air quality in cities is “serious.” In China’s top 10 river valleys in 2013, about 9% of the water sections was class V, the worst level. Of 4,778 monitoring sites for groundwater almost 60% were poor or extremely poor. Water quality in the East China Sea and in four of China’s nine biggest bays was extremely poor. Soil pollution and land degradation are also serious, according to Li, who said arable land had been reduced by 80,200 hectares in 2013, and a total of 295 million hectares, or 30.7% of China’s land area, was suffering soil erosion. About 82.8% of the polluted land was contaminated by inorganic materials with the top three pollutants cadmium, nickel and arsenic. The level of major pollutants has dropped in the past year. Chemical oxygen demand emissions were reduced by 2.9%, while emissions of sulfur dioxide dropped by 3.5%, but compared to 2012, the percentage of class V water quality in the 10 major river basins dropped by only 1.2 percentage points.

China’s campaign to shave off mountaintops and fill in valleys to make way for cities may come at too high a price in the pollution, erosion and flooding unleashed by the unprecedented redistribution of earth, researchers warned. Dozens of peaks up to 150 meters tall have been flattened to fill up valleys and create tens of square kilometers of land over the past decade. But there has been little assessment of the costs and environmental impact of these projects, researchers at Chang’an University said in a commentary published in the journal Nature. “Land creation by cutting off hilltops and moving massive quantities of dirt is like performing major surgery on the earth’s crust,” the group said. In addition to causing air and water pollution, erosion, landslides and flooding, the projects have destroyed farmlands and habitat for wild animals and plants, the group said. Mountaintop removal has never been carried out on the scale underway in China or used to construct urban areas, the researchers said. The first city to expand by bulldozing its mountaintops was Shiyan, Hubei province, in 2007. The transformation caused landslides and flooding, altered watercourses and increased the sediment content in local water sources. In neighboring Shaanxi province, Yanan aims to double its area by creating 79 square kilometers of flat ground in a project started in 2012. The authors of the study questioned the cost benefits of landfills, noting that the Yanan project will cost CNY100 billion over 10 years, but that it will take at least that long for the filled-in valleys to become stable enough for building, the China Daily reports.

Following three drinking water pollution incidents in one month, environment officials said they are placing water quality at the top of their list of national environmental challenges this year. “The outlook on water quality nationally is not optimistic, with 9% of the monitoring sections among the 10 major watersheds rated lower than Grade V, the worst level,” Vice Minister of Environmental Protection Li Ganjie said at news conference. Experts have said the government must take tougher measures to protect sources of drinking water and expedite the construction of backup sources. More than 10 drinking water pollution incidents happen each year. The recent string of incidents began on April 10 in Lanzhou, Gansu province. City authorities detected excessive benzene in the tap water and shut down water lines for five days in some parts of the city, resulting in frenetic purchasing of liquids at supermarkets. On April 23, authorities in Wuhan, Hubei province, suspended its tap water for more than 16 hours after excessive ammonia nitrogen was discovered in the Hanjiang river. On May 9, the government of Jingjiang, a city along the Yangtze river in Jiangsu province, suspended its tap water sourced from the river for seven hours after a “pungent smell” was detected. Zhang Xiaojian, Professor at the School of the Environment at Tsinghua University, said that among all sources of drinking water－including rivers, reservoirs, and groundwater－rivers pose the greatest risk as many industrial facilities are located close by. China raised the number of water quality indicators on July 1, 2012 to 106 from 35, but fewer than 10 indicators among the 106 are officially tested on a daily basis. Some are tested once a month, twice a year, or every two years. Half of the cities in China have only one drinking water source. Once water pollution incidents occur, cities become paralyzed, said Li Yuanyuan, Deputy Dean of the China Renewable Energy Engineering Institute.