Let's say information about factory emissions of toxic metals was readily available to the public in Hunan and Shaanxi provinces. Would more than 1,600 children still have been poisoned by lead or cadmium recently? Or would local citizens instead have had the information about health risks in their midst needed to protect themselves or to push the local government and factory officials to take necessary steps to protect the community? Could these pollution problems have been resolved before they reached such a late and devastating stage? Would there have been the sort of unrest seen in recent days?
My colleague HU Yuanqiong (Joan) stated the case in a recent AP article:
"The best way to ensure social stability and the sustainability of the economy is to make information open and allow public participation in monitoring emissions and to have a mechanism between the public and the factories to talk things out and resolve disputes," Hu said.
China's Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has posted an article (Chinese only) on its official website that raises these issues and advocates for expansion of environmental information as a way to prevent the type of "mending the fence after the sheep are lost" (亡羊补牢) approach to pollution we see today. [We'll post an English translation in the next day or two.] This is very good to see, and we can only hope that recent accidents can serve as an inflection point for serious changes going forward.
Back in the mid-80s, Union Carbide chemical accidents in Bhopal, India (and soon after in West Virginia) drove the creation in the United States of the Toxics Release Inventory - a nationwide toxic emissions inventory that gave unprecedented public access to information about toxic chemicals emissions. One way for China to positively respond to recent pollution accidents would be to establish a much more expansive Chinese open environmental information system, notifying the public of toxic emissions and the health risks they present. Vice Premier LI Keqiang this past week made a pledge to strengthen environmental protection. This would be an important way to get this effort underway.
In this economic downturn, China has been investing heavily in infrastructure - rail, highways and the like - to make China more economically competitive going forward. Think of open environmental information as necessary environmental protection infrastructure, without which the entire environmental protection system breaks down. Yesterday, China's Ministry of Environmental Protection already approved in principle a plan to more aggressively regulation heavy metal pollution. Let's hope that it includes an aggressive push for information infrastructure that will be strengthened in the coming months and years.
***This was originally posted on the NRDC Switchboard.
Alex Wang is based in NRDC's Beijing office, working with China's policy-makers, fledgling environmental groups, and legal community to strengthen environmental protection in this, the largest and fastest growing country in the world. Prior to moving to Beijing in 2004, he lived in one of the world's other most bustling cities, New York City, and worked as an associate attorney at a private law firm. He graduated from New York University School of Law, and received a B.S. in Biology from Duke University.
