After my last post, I’ve looked online on how bad air pollution in china really is. I am curious as I’ve been reading on how air pollution cause birth defect, respiratory diseases & premature diseases but is it that bad till birth defects are increasing in china?

I found a journal article about pollution in China(Liu, et al, 2016). The article did a study from 2004 to 2012.  During that period it showed an overall increase in pollutants level in the atmosphere, population exposure to the pollutants, and increasing deaths due to respiratory disease that may be due to inhaling the pollutants. The exposure was increasing due to the increase in the urbanization of its citizens. As there are a high number of traffics and industrial activities in the urban area, it makes it a heavily polluted area. To make matters worst, they live in the urban area with their whole family causing exposure of pollutants to their kids.  In the BBC news video, a stall owner was interviewed and he claims that his children’s health is affected and coughing as the usual symptoms. Another citizen also mentioned that they cant leave and migrate again as there will be cost involve that he won’t be able to afford and he also claims that the other urban cities are also affected.

In my point of view, I feel that efforts to counter air pollution need to be accelerated. The 2 main causes of heavy pollution are still because of high car ownership and heavily reliant on the burning of fossil fuel for energy. They have plenty of human resources with the capability to focus on research on development for better source of energy and vehicle technology that does not emit pollutants.  They are also at an advantage with the amount of land they have to build clean energy infrastructure.  I also feel that if they put more effort into innovating new technology that benefits the environments it could be used to alleviate their economy too as they can import the energy to neighboring countries and export the technologies.

Therefore I feel that more effort has to be put into this win-win situation for the benefit of their citizen and its economy.

 

 

reference

China’s rapid development on Youtube;

China toxic smog – BBC news:

Spatial and temporal trends in the mortality burden of air pollution in China: 2004–2012
13 October 2016
https://www-sciencedirect-com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/science/article/pii/S0160412016305529?via%3Dihub