Premature deaths and health problems from air pollution cost China as much as US$300 billion a year, an official report said yesterday, calling for a new urbanization model for the world’s second-largest economy.
“As China prepares for the next wave of urbanization, addressing environmental and resource constraints will become increasingly more urgent because much of China’s pollution is concentrated in its cities,” said the joint report by the World Bank and the Development Research Center of the State Council, China’s Cabinet.
High mortality levels and other health problems from China’s notorious air pollution are estimated to cost the country from US$100 billion to more than US$300 billion a year, said the report, which was 14 months in the making.
Writing in the Lancet in December last year, former Chinese health minister Chen Zhu (陳竺) cited studies showing air pollution caused up to 500,000 premature deaths a year in China.
Tuesday’s report said the long-term consequences could include birth defects and impaired cognitive functions, because young children and infants are severely affected by poor air quality.
China’s rapid urbanization over the past three decades — a key part of its economic boom — has avoided some common ills such as large-scale slums and unemployment, the report said.
“But strains have begun to emerge in the form of rising inequality, environmental degradation and the quickening depletion of natural resources,” it said.
Much of the new urban land was taken from farmers at prices often no more than 20 percent of market values and the amount of available farmland is now close to the minimum level necessary to ensure food security, the report said.
If trends continue, an additional 34,000km2 — an area about the size of the Netherlands — will be needed to accommodate the growth of cities in the next decade, it added.
China needs to reform the way it expands its cities and curb inefficient urban sprawl, which has sometimes produced ghost towns and wasteful property development, the report said.
On current trends China will spend US$5.3 trillion on urbanization over the next 15 years — but with more efficient, denser cities the country could save about US$1.4 trillion, or 15 percent of its GDP last year, World Bank managing director Sri Mulyani Indrawati told a conference in Beijing yesterday.
The report proposed six areas for reform, including more efficient land management that better benefits farmers and adjustments to the “hukou (戶口)” residence registration system to give migrant workers equal access to basic public services.
It also called on Beijing to step up its law enforcement on pollution.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) vowed to “declare war” on pollution at the country’s annual legislative gathering this month and announced new measures to add to a raft of others issued over the past year.
Yesterday, China’s pollution agency said the country’s energy-hungry, high-polluting industries continued to grow too fast last year, putting “huge pressures” on the environment and causing air quality to worsen further.
China is still too slow when it comes to reforming its resource-intensive economy, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said in a statement to mark a report on pollution in 74 Chinese cities last year.
Just three of the 74 cities studied fully complied with state pollution standards last year, the environment ministry said this month.
Additional reporting by Reuters
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to