L'environnement serait en cause dans 40 % des décès

Le Monde

Deux morts sur cinq dans le monde seraient liés directement ou indirectement à des facteurs environnementaux, selon une étude mise en ligne depuis le début du mois d'août sur le site de la revue Human Ecology, qui la publiera dans son numéro de décembre. Pour parvenir à ce chiffre, David Pimentel, professeur en écologie et en agronomie, et une équipe d'étudiants de l'université Cornell (Etat de New York) se sont appuyés sur plus de 120 articles scientifiques concernant les effets sur la santé humaine de l'augmentation de la population mondiale, de la malnutrition et de toutes sortes d'atteintes à l'environnement. suite...

China cuts water supplies to 200,000

By Mure Dickie in Beijing

Financial Times

Authorities in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province cut off water supplies to 200,000 people for nearly two days this week after a local river was found with dangerous levels of ammonia.

The cut-off in Jiangsu's Shuyang city – the latest in a series of pollution scandals that have disrupted water supplies to millions – came as a top environment official warned that the already-dire plight of Chinese rivers and lakes was still worsening.

“The traditional approach of growth through industrialisation has pushed China's resources and environment close to breaking point, and the daily lives of the people are seriously threatened,” said Pan Yue, deputy head of the State Environmental Protection Administration.

“Traditional administration methods cannot resolve the accumulated environmental problems,” Mr Pan said in a statement on Sepa’s website.

World Bank and government researchers recently estimated that 60,000 people in China are dying prematurely each year because of poor quality water, mainly in rural areas.

Water pollution has become a hot topic following huge outbreaks of algae in China’s Taihu, Chaohu and Dianchi lakes. Wen Jiabao, the premier, this month ordered local officials to “strengthen supervision and ban factories from discharging pollutants into the lakes”.

But Beijing leaders have often issued such instructions, and Mr Pan of Sepa left no doubt that past ap­proaches were not working.

In a chilling description of the scale of the challenge, he said 26 per cent of water in China’s seven biggest river systems had been found to be unable to support animal life, or was dangerous even to bathe in.

He said seven of the nine main lakes monitored by the state had been found to be “wholly” polluted.

“For more than 10 years the state has spent huge sums to deal with pollution in the drainage areas of the ‘three rivers and three lakes’, but the pace of action has fallen far behind the pace of destruction,” Mr Pan said. “Now areas that had improved are suffering renewed pollution.”

In other areas, water quality had steadily worsened. On one tributary of the northern Hai river, for example, pollution had killed all animal life in the “blackish-green, acrid-smelling” water and “seriously harmed” the lives of the people of 13 townships and 119 villages.

To try to force action against the most egregious polluters, Mr Pan said Sepa would not issue any approvals for new industrial projects in six cities, two counties and five industrial zones, with the ban to remain in place until they improved water quality enforcement.

The move is likely to have little direct effect, since Sepa officials say their influence with local officials is limited. Past Sepa controls on development appear to have been widely ignored.

However, Mr Pan said he hoped the new “restricted approvals” approach, which could be extended to other areas, would be a “starting point” for new approaches combining administrative action with market forces and public participation.

Sepa clearly hopes public opinion will help make up for its lack of clout. Mr Pan said it would issue regular updates on targeted companies and areas in order to “allow all of society to supervise river basin water pollution prevention”.

Beijing clouds the pollution picture

By Richard McGregor in Beijing

Financial Times

The World Bank conjured a daring finale to a conference it co-hosted in Beijing in March on pollution, staging a Chinese adaptation of a Henrik Ibsen play about a doctor trying to alert citizens to an environmental problem.

The doctor’s battle in An Enemy of the People to reveal the truth has striking parallels with efforts by reformers in China to force the authorities to be more open about the damage to the environment resulting from the pursuit of high-speed growth. More...

750,000 a year killed by Chinese pollution

By Richard McGregor in Beijing

Financial Times

Beijing engineered the removal of nearly a third of a World Bank report on pollution in China because of concerns that findings on premature deaths could provoke “social unrest”.

The report, produced in co-operation with Chinese government ministries over several years, found about 750,000 people die prematurely in China each year, mainly from air pollution in large cities.

China’s State Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) and health ministry asked the World Bank to cut the calculations of premature deaths from the report when a draft was finished last year, according to Bank advisers and Chinese officials.

Advisers to the research team said ministries told them this information, including a detailed map showing which parts of the country suffered the most deaths, was too sensitive.

“The World Bank was told that it could not publish this information. It was too sensitive and could cause social unrest,” one adviser to the study told the Financial Times.

Sixteen of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China, according to previous World Bank research. Guo Xiaomin, a retired Sepa official who co-ordinated the Chinese research team, said some material was omitted from the pollution report because of concerns that the methodology was unreliable. But he also said such information on premature deaths “could cause misunderstanding”.“We did not announce these figures. We did not want to make this report too thick,” he said in an interview.

The pared-down report, “Cost of Pollution in China”, has yet to be officially launched but a version, which can be downloaded from the internet was released at a conference in Beijing in March. Missing from this report are the research project’s findings that high air-pollution levels in Chinese cities is leading to the premature deaths of 350,000-400,000 people each year. A further 300,000 people die prematurely each year from exposure to poor air indoors, according to advisers, but little discussion of this issue survived in the report because it was outside the ambit of the Chinese ministries which sponsored the research.Another 60,000-odd premature deaths were attributable to poor-quality water, largely in the countryside, from severe diarrhoea, and stomach, liver and bladder cancers.

The mortality information was “reluctantly” excised by the World Bank from the published report, according to advisers to the research project. Sepa and the health ministry declined to comment. The World Bank said that the findings of the report were still being discussed with the government. A spokesperson said: “The conference version of the report did not include some of the issues still under discussion.” She said the findings of the report were due to be released as a series of papers soon.