The Kaohsiung City Government’s efforts to reduce air pollution ahead of the Mizuno International Marathon on Sunday won praise yesterday, while other local administrations were urged to follow suit and the central government urged to toughen pollution regulations.
The city asked 20 of its biggest factories to cut emissions to protect the health of more than 20,000 competitors expected to take part in the marathon, including 700 from overseas, while the Taichung City Government, which is hosting a marathon the same day, did not, Air Clean Taiwan director Yeh Guang-perng (葉光芃) told a news conference in Taipei.
Taichung has refused to take such action even when its air quality was bad, which raised the question of whether it thought Taiwanese were as important as foreigners, Yeh said.
The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) should also have asked factories in central Taiwan to cut their emissions, given that those emissions are often blown south by the northeastern monsoon, Yeh said.
City and county environmental agencies should not just seek to reduce pollution ahead of international events, but tackle the pollution that is hurting their residents every day, Yeh said.
The Regulations Governing Air Pollution Emergency (空氣品質惡化緊急防制辦法) require the EPA to establish a central emergency center when more than half of the nation’s air monitoring stations show a red warning (unhealthy levels for all groups), Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Arthur Chen (陳宜民) told the news conference.
Municipalities in central and southern Taiwan, which account for about 51 percent of the nation’s total population, suffer more serious air pollution than those in the north, so such a prerequisite is unfair, he said.
The EPA should amend the regulations to base the need for a central emergency center on “the number of people affected,” not the number of stations giving a red warning, Chen said.
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