China's environmental quality keeps improving but still faces challenges: Report

ANKARA

China's environment continued to see improvement in the last year but still faces challenges related to stability, said an official report released Monday.

Giving credit to "comprehensive policies and measures" for the improvements, the annual report said the country's environmental authorities have vowed to "further enhance monitoring to reinforce long-term environmental improvement," the local Global Times newspaper reported.

Some 339 cities on average enjoyed 86.5% of days of good air quality in 2022, surpassing the country's goal by 0.9 percentage points, according to China Environment Report 2022 published by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE).

"The foundation of environmental stability is not solid, and the difficulty of long-term environmental improvement has been increasing," Jiang Huohua, the chief at the Department of Ecological and Environmental Monitoring at MEE, was cited as saying.

According to the report, the average temperature in China was 10.51C (50.9F) in 2022, 0.62C higher than average between 1991 and 2020, and the highest since 1951. The country's average rainfall meanwhile was 606.1 millimeters (1.98 feet), 5% less than the 1991-2020 average, and the lowest in the last decade. Carbon emissions per 10,000 yuan of GDP also dropped 0.8% from 2021 levels, said the report.

In recent years, Jiang said, the impact of sand and dust storms on air quality has attracted attention.

"According to analysis, the main sources of dust and sand affecting northern China in several major dust events since this spring are the Gobi Desert region in southern Mongolia and the sand source areas in Northwest China," he added.

Energy consumption

According to preliminary calculations, total energy consumption in 2022 was equal to 5.41 billion tons of standard coal, an increase of 2.9% above 2021 levels. Coal consumption increased by 4.3%, crude oil consumption dropped by 3.1% and natural gas consumption dropped by 4.3%, while electricity consumption increased by 3.6%.

Coal consumption accounted for 56.2% of total energy consumption, 0.3% percentage points higher than 2021, while clean energy consumption such as natural gas, hydropower, nuclear power, wind power and solar energy accounted for 25.9% of total energy consumption, 0.4% percentage points more than 2021, the report said.

With regards to the country's biodiversity, China has identified 138,293 species, including 63,886 animals, 39,188 plants and 655 viruses.

On Monday, MEE also published Marine Environment Report 2022, suggesting that the marine environment remained stable that year.

Nuclear-contaminated water

Nuclear-contaminated water from Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant has been a concern.

So far, the report said, no abnormal radiation levels have been observed in the jurisdictional coastal areas.

The natural radionuclide activity concentration in the seawater of the jurisdictional waters is at normal levels, and there is no significant presence of artificial radioactive nuclides.

Moreover, overall activity concentration of radioactive isotopes associated with nuclear power plant operations in the seawater, sediments and marine organisms in the coastal areas remains within the fluctuational range seen in previous years, the report added.