Beijing promotes green 2022 Winter Games

Capital making continuous efforts to improve the environment

The Beijing government has approached the Winter Olympics, which will get underway in February, with the principles of being green, low-carbon and sustainable. And this has provided a great opportunity to improve the city's environment, transform and upgrade in a direction toward green development, local officials said.

With reductions in carbon emissions as a major strategic goal, the Beijing government has insisted on coordinated management to handle pollution control and ecological protection, resulting in a steady improvement in the quality of the natural environment in recent years, said Yu Jianhua, deputy director of the Beijing Ecology and Environment Bureau.

Since the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), the capital has highlighted lowering the concentration of PM2.5－fine particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less－by adopting a series of strong measures to control and deal with air pollution.

According to the city government's work report, the annual average concentration of PM2.5 dropped accumulatively by 53 percent to less than 40 micrograms per cubic meters during the five years.

"Beijing's success in air pollution prevention and control has been included in the United Nations Environment Programme's case studies," Yu said.

The capital has formulated regulations on the prevention and control of pollution discharged by motor vehicles and nonroad mobile machinery, and also developed a domestically leading environmental standard system, including 41 standards pertaining to air.

Investment has increased in the city to effectively support the implementation of key projects such as the clean energy renovation of coal-fired boilers, and the upgrading of polluting enterprises.

Yu said Beijing has built an intelligent air quality grid monitoring system, which can achieve full coverage of particulate matter monitoring in the air.

Beijing has seen good results in its green development, covering such fields as industrial structure, energy use and vehicle upgrades, he added.

For example, the contribution of the service industry to the city's GDP has been further increased; total coal consumption has been declining due to the encouragement of the use of clean energy; and registered motor vehicles meeting State V emission standards or above account for 70 percent of the total, Yu said.

Thanks to these innovative approaches, Beijing's carbon dioxide emissions per 10,000 yuan ($1,570) of GDP were 0.41 metric tons in 2020, decreasing more than 26 percent compared with the 2015 level, and exceeding the goal of 20.5 percent in the 13th Five-Year Plan period.

The city has contributed its "Beijing experience" to the construction of low-carbon cities across the country, Yu said.

Beijing has also hosted the International Forum for Metropolitan Clean Air and Climate Actions for five consecutive years, providing an effective communication platform for international metropolises to jointly address environmental challenges and promote global sustainable development.

Starting in November 2020, Beijing has issued a popular science series of Beijing's "biological map".

Compiled by the city's Ecology and Environment Bureau, the series tells stories of animals, plants and other creatures, both common and rare, which were found in Beijing's biodiversity survey carried out last year. The survey registered 5,086 species and found 70 newly recorded species.

During the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, known as COP15, held in October in Kunming, Yunnan province, Beijing launched an online exhibition named the Great Beauty of Beijing to demonstrate the city's high-level conservation achievements to the world. It also demonstrates its commitments to develop into a world-class, harmonious and livable city, and efforts to become a model of biodiversity conservation in megacities.

The Beijing government has focused on developing zones that demonstrate best practices for promoting sound ecology. This year, the city's Haidian and Huairou districts became national demonstration zones for ecological civilization construction. Ecological civilization is the goal of achieving social and environmental reform within a given society.