Nations should consider cost, impact of air pollution control, expert says

Developing nations should not forge ahead with air pollution control without considering the costs and the potential impact on people's livelihood, an environmental expert said.

While this is never easy, China's success with significantly improving air quality in just a decade has been a source of confidence for countries in the Global South to address air pollution in a comparatively short period of time, said Zhang Hongliang, a professor at the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Zhang has been engaged in exchanges with officials and experts from developing nations on air pollution control for a long time, especially those from India.

Together with his friends from India and China, he initiated a China-India Association of Atmospheric Scientists at Nanjing University's of Information Sciences & Technology in Jiangsu province. He established the group during the summer of 2018, when he was working at Louisiana State University in the United States.

The next year, the association organized an exchange event at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, which drew the participation of Tao Shu, a well-noted expert on air pollution control in China and an academician with the China Academy of Sciences.

During their trip to India, Zhang and another Chinese expert were invited to the home of a senior official with the New Delhi government who was in charge of air pollution control and food safety, where they discussed China's efforts and progress in controlling air pollution, Zhang recalled.

When the Indian government began working on a five-year plan to reduce air pollution later in the year, Chinese members of the association translated some Chinese policy documents concerning air quality standards and targets for Indian authorities for reference.

Zhang, who worked in the US from 2008 to 2019, said he found that despite fluctuations in the China-US relationship, some US experts and institutes have been consistently devoted to assisting China in its air quality management work, which has played a role in promoting people-to-people exchanges between the two countries.

While India was dealing with air pollution in 2018, China had by then accumulated some experience with air quality management that could be beneficial for India. Zhang initiated the association because he hoped it would play a role in promoting exchanges between Chinese and Indian people, he said.

"Air pollution is a problem that nobody is immune from, whether you are a common civilian or a State leader, and thus both political elites and the public in developing nations may have the willingness to control air pollution," he said.

He pointed out, however, that despite common willingness, governments of developing nations still need to draw a clear picture not only about the changes that may be brought by measures they plan to roll out, but also their costs.

"A key issue for developing nations is that they need to strive to strike a balance between economic development and pollution control," he stressed, adding they need to ensure that people's livelihood will not be significantly affected by their air pollution control campaigns.

China's success in rapidly improving air quality has boosted the confidence of other developing countries in tackling air pollution, he said.

"US and European countries spent about half a century to resolve their air pollution problems. Many people believed that the process could last for a century in China, considering that the country was confronted with a much worse air pollution situation," he said.

Such an assertion once made many developing countries diffident about their air quality management efforts. But China's experience has proven that "if they are determined to address the problem, they can also be successful in 30 to 50 years, or even less," he said.