China Is Set to Lose 2% of GDP Cleaning Up Decades of Pollution
Li Pingri remembers swimming with fish and shrimp as a boy in Guangdong's Chigang waterway in China. Today, even after the city spent 48.6 billion yuan ($7.2 billion) on a cleanup, he can't stand the canal's smell.
"We are surrounded by black and smelly waterways, breathing the foul air every day and paying the price at the cost of our health," said Li, 79, a former researcher at the Guangzhou Institute of Geography. "If we can't breathe clean air or drink clean water, high economic growth is meaningless."
China, the world's worst polluter, needs to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product a year -- 680 billion yuan at 2009 figures -- to clean up 30 years of industrial waste, said He Ping, chairman of the Washington-based International Fund for China's Environment. Mun Sing Ho, a senior economist at Dale W. Jorgenson Associates and a visiting scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put the range at 2 percent to 4 percent of GDP.
Failure to spend that much -- equivalent to the annual GDP of Vietnam -- may cost the Chinese economy half as much again in blighted crops, health costs and pollution-related expenses, He said: "The cleanup can't catch up with the speed of pollution" if spending is less....
Lost Productivity
The costs arising from pollution in China -- including lost productivity due to health issues, crop degradation and losses from pollution-related accidents -- totaled 511.8 billion yuan, or 3.1 percent of GDP, in 2004, the latest figures available, according to the Beijing-based Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning, part of the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
China doubled total environmental spending in the 2006-2010 period to 1.4 trillion yuan from the previous five-year plan, and may more than double it again to 3.1 trillion yuan in the five years through 2015, said Wang Jinnan, vice-president of the academy.
That's less than the amount He predicts will be needed on the cleanup and includes other costs: developing alternative energy and new sewage works, and protecting ecological habitats. It's also less than the 4 trillion yuan China spent on stimulus in one year to boost the economy.
Twitter Protests
"Environmental protests have been one of the leading sources of social unrest for more than two decades," Elizabeth Economy, director for Asia Studies at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The River Runs Black," a book on China's environment, said in an e-mail. What has changed is "the ability of people to communicate through texting, e- mail, and Twitter to organize a protest."
Campaigns of up to 10,000 people in major cities such as Xiamen, Zhangzhou and Chengdu were fighting the planned siting of large-scale chemical plants, and in some cases have forced the government to reverse a decision, Economy told the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China in October 2009. She said about 700 million people in China drink water contaminated with human or animal waste.
Clearly things are much, much worse in China, but they seem to be on the cusp of starting to get dramatically better.
