Beijing’s notoriously dirty air became cleaner during last summer’s Olympic Games, but the weather played a larger role than the government’s massive pollution control measures, a new report says.
The first major study on air pollution during the Olympics found that conditions in Beijing were far worse than at other recent Olympics, even with the government’s cleanup campaign. Particulate levels often exceeded what the WHO considers safe.
The report was published on Friday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology and funded by the National Science Foundation in the US and the National Science Foundation in China.
The Chinese government’s plans to control air pollution for the Olympics gave international researchers a unique opportunity to observe a large-scale experiment. Scientists from Oregon State University and Peking University looked at Beijing’s worst air pollutant — tiny dust particles known as particulate matter — over an eight-week period before, during and after the games.
When Beijing won the bid for the Olympics in 2001, China poured some US$20 billion into “greening” the city, including doubling the number of subway lines, retrofitting factories with cleaner technology and building urban parks.
Beijing officials also imposed drastic cleanup measures just before the games in the middle of July, including pulling half the city’s 3.3 million vehicles off the roads, halting most construction and closing dozens of factories.
The study found that particulate air pollution decreased by about one-third during the two-week Olympic period compared with other periods.
But further investigation suggested that the weather, such as rainfall and strong winds from the north and northwest, played a much larger factor in clearing the air.
Meteorological conditions accounted for 40 percent of the variation in concentrations of coarser particulate matter, or PM 10, while pollution control measures accounted for only 16 percent, the study said.
“It was a giant experiment and a noble effort. But in the end, the extra added measures didn’t help reduce PM concentration as much as had been expected,” said Staci Simonich, an associate professor of chemistry and toxicology at Oregon State University who worked on the study.
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