All eyes on China: Workers eat in front of the Bird's Nest stadium on 31 July. China unveiled a string of potential last-ditch measures to battle the city's defiant smog ahead of the games, as Beijing was again shrouded in a cloak of haze.

Credit: AFP

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Chinese action on Olympic air pollution is a huge experiment that will be closely watched across China, and further afield.

The Beijing Olympic Air Quality Monitoring and Warning Project, a 30 million yuan (US$4.3/A$4.9 million) monitoring system, has been created in an attempt to guarantee clear skies for the games.

Jointly launched by the Beijing municipal government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the system has been fully active since June. It has 25 comprehensive air quality monitoring stations and several mobile surveillance vehicles in Beijing and adjacent cities.

Beijing's air quality has been unpalatable to some athletes. Back in May, the marathon world record holder Haile Gebrselassie, who suffers from asthma, confirmed that he would skip the games for fear of Beijing smog. And in June, Australian officials said their track and field athletes will not participate in the opening ceremony, partly because of pollution problems.

But Chinese scientists say the monitoring is providing ways to improve air quality, in the short term at least.

China's pollution problem

China has been monitoring air quality since the 1950s. But in the late 1990s, air quality worsened and respiratory disease increased, triggering attempts to tackle the problem.

Ten cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, started issuing daily air quality reports in 1998.

Each year, China sees 350,000 cases of respiratory diseases, such as asthma and bronchitis, due to urban air pollution. The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention estimates this costs around seven per cent of the country's annual gross domestic product.

Jin Yinlong, an official with the centre, says that although the country's air quality has recently improved, urban air pollution "remains serious".

In 2006, 37.6 per cent of China's 559 major cities did not meet national air quality standards.

"Beijing's major pollutants — nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, suspended particulate matter (dust less than ten micrometres diameter), ozone and carbon monoxide — come from vehicle exhaust, factories, and construction sites, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) mainly come from gas stations," says Wang Yuesi, a researcher with CAS's Institute of Atmospheric Physics.

"Vehicle emissions contribute 60 to 70 per cent of air pollution in Beijing, and these pollutants usually stay in the air for three to four days," Wang adds.

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