Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines, Health

ENVIRONMENT-CHINA: Jittery Officials Thwart Green GDP Report

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Jul 27 2007 (IPS) - The pollution cost tally is becoming a potentially explosive political issue in China.

In a throwback to the early 1990s when the authorities suppressed publication of pollution indexes for fear of inciting public unrest, the government now is concerned that the release of a study adding up the cost of the nation’s environmental damage would provoke social backlash.

The calculation of China’s “green GDP” – a breakthrough project attempting to compute the environmental cost of the country’s economic success – has been put on hold indefinitely, with one of its chief designers admitting he worries the project would be scrapped altogether.

“In the current sensitive climate when everybody is talking about ‘green change’, some provinces fear the publicising of their revised GDP (gross domestic product) figures,” Wang Jinnan, one of the heads of the project from the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning, said this week.

“Some local governments have lobbied us and even tried to put pressure on us not to make the green GDP report public,” he added.

Last year for the first time, the combined efforts of China’s environmental watchdog and the National Bureau of Statistics produced a study estimating the cost of environmental degradation in relation to the country’s GDP. According to the report, environmental degradation in 2004 cost China some 64 billion dollars, or 3.05 percent of its GDP.

The new report for 2005, which was completed at the end of last year but never made public, reveals “losses from pollution and reduction in the GDP indicator even higher than the 2004 report,” the Beijing News said this week, citing interviews with experts involved in the report.

What is more, the study would have presented a detailed picture for pollution and GDP losses for each province, thus assigning responsibility for environmental degradation to individual localities.

The release of the report, however, has now been “postponed indefinitely”, according to Wang, following a six-month battle between the State Environmental Protection Administration and the National Bureau of Statistics.

“There exist major differences between the environmental protection agency and the statistical bureau regarding the content of the report and the ways of its distribution,” Wang told the Beijing News. “Without the support of the statistics bureau though, I fear for the future of our project.”

What the statisticians worry about, according to Wang, is unfavourable reaction from provincial governments. Despite the onset of new “green thinking” in the country, local officials in China are still officially judged by their abilities to deliver fast economic growth, and fear that the pollution data would hurt their performance assessments.

Defending the decision to withhold the report, Statistics bureau chief Xie Fuzhan said earlier this month there was no internationally accepted standard for putting a price on pollution cost. He told a press conference China was effectively pioneering an effort never attempted officially by another government.

“Come back to me only if you can find any other country in the world that accepts the green GDP concept,” Xie told reporters.

But Chinese environmental experts fight back. They argue in the developed world there exists other restraints for officials blindly pursuing economic growth like responsibility to one’s electorate that make calculation of green GDP unnecessary. In China’s upwardly responsible bureaucracy though, the only way forward in environmental preservation would be to include pollution control in officials’ performance assessments.

“Calculating the country’s ‘green GDP’ is the cheapest and probably most feasible way for China to reform the current dominant thinking about officials’ performance,” says independent environmental scholar Ma Jun.

The current bureaucratic battle illustrates the rising social stakes in China’s continuous emergence as a great economic powerhouse. China’s economic engine is racing to surpass Germany as the world’s third-biggest national economy but experts sound the alarm at the rising environmental tall of this success.

The nation’s smoke-filled cities and filthy waterways are making many people ill. Worsening pollution and environmental degradation are fuelling a cycle of unrest in China, putting the world’s fastest-growing economy in peril, said the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) this month in a review requested by the Chinese government.

The OECD study was supported by an earlier World Bank report, which said that by 2020, China is looking at 60,000 premature deaths per year in its cities. Apart from that, it predicts another 20 million affected by respiratory illness from pollution. Those figures add up to 13 percent of GDP in the total cost of damage to health.