China's Ministry of Science and Technology has started planning a five-year air pollution prevention and control project.
According to the draft, the focus of air pollution control should be shifted from simply responding to heavy smog to a coordinated scheme to prevent both PM2.5 and ozone (O3).
Air pollution monitoring and management practices will also be shifted from the city level to a regional scale
This comes after the former president of Tsinghua University Chen Jining was appointed as China's new Environmental Protection minister.
Chen has pledged to enhance supervision over local governments to strictly enforce the country's environmental rules.
Meanwhile, Vice minister of Enviromental Protection Pan Yue has released enforcement results under the country's new Environmental Protection Law.
"Fines worth over 7 million yuan (1.15 million U.S. dollars) involving 15 cases have been imposed since the Environmental Protection Law took effect in January. The largest fine for one single case reached nearly 2 million yuan. In 122 cases, factories' production has been restricted or the factories have even been shut down."
Over the weekend, former CCTV reporter Chai Jing's smog documentary "Under the Dome" went viral and provoked national discussion on a massive scale.
For more on this, we earlier spoke with Dimitri De Boer, Head of the EU-China Environmental Governance Program.
1) Under the new project, coordination of air pollution controls is to be shift from cities to a region-wide scale. How significant is this move in the national fight against air pollution?
2) Over 7 million yuan in fines have been levelled so far, in 15 separate cases. What do these numbers tell us about the effectiveness of the new law so far?
3) what are the main challenges for China's enviroment and the country's anti-pollution laws?
