China placed Beijing on a mandatory pollution red alert, closing schools and minimizing construction due to extreme smog affecting the air quality in the heavily-populated capital. China will strengthen inspections of polluting factories, Environmental Protection Minister Chen Jining said, according to China Daily.
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Although Beijing has in recent years seen smog at much worse levels than Tuesday’s, the latest bout of pollution was the first to trigger a red alert under a 2-year-old system that requires a forecast at the outset of at least 72 hours of consecutive high pollution.
The program, dubbed Green Horizons, will expand its use of big data from machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to help tackle a range of environmental issues, such as air and water pollution or intermittent renewable energy supplies, in India, Japan, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the US.
Weather conditions have an immediate effect upon city residents experience the consequences of air pollution, from high temperatures raising ground level ozone concentrations to high winds taking industrial particulates into urban areas. Schools closed and rush-hour roads were much quieter than normal as Beijing’s first-ever red alert…
Beijing and four other cities in northern China have issued pollution red alerts, which are triggered when the government believes air quality will surpass a level of 200 on an air quality index that measures various pollutants.
Last week, Beijing has issued an orange alert for pollution with 35 times the acceptable standard set by the World Health Organization (WHO), as previously reported by iSchoolguide. To regulate the number of cars on city roads, Beijing citizens are allowed to only drive on certain days. The policies mean, too, that the sources of the pollution that afflict Beijing are not really being addressed by this city’s red alert regulations: Most of the pollution comes from coal-burning factories in Hebei, Henan and other provinces, not from Beijing itself. And, as we’re seeing in Beijing lately, that kind of waste isn’t just academic: it dramatically impact the lives of millions of people.
The ancient Forbidden City palace complex and other Beijing landmarks were lost in a gray, soupy haze on Wednesday.
Beijing’s longtime pollution problems are a combination of geography, rapid economic growth and longtime lack of pollution controls, experts say.
IBM Research, a division of the company, will help an advisory body known as the Delhi Dialogue Commission to understand the link between traffic patterns and smog in the Indian capital so that decisions related to improving air quality can be backed with modeling, the Armonk, New York-based company said on Wednesday. So he spent one hundred days in the capital city literally collecting polluted air.
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“An air purifier is a must at home”, said Sun Yuanyuan, 30, an employee of a foreign company.
