China Report Shows More Pollution in Waterways (photo)

Peter Parks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A heavily polluted river in the town of Zhugao in China’s southwest Sichuan province earlier this month.

By JONATHAN ANSFIELD and KEITH BRADSHER

Published: February 9, 2010

BEIJING — China’s government on Tuesday unveiled its most detailed survey ever of the pollution plaguing the country, revealing that water pollution in 2007 was more than twice as severe as was shown in official figures that had long omitted agricultural waste.

The first national pollution census, environmentalists said, represented a small step forward for China in terms of transparency. But the results also raised serious questions about the shortcomings of China’s previous pollution data and suggested that even with limited progress in some areas, the country still had a long way to go to clean its waterways and air.

The pollution census, scheduled to be repeated in 2020, took more than two years to complete. It involved 570,000 people, and included 1.1 billion pieces of data from nearly 6 million sources of pollution, including factories, farms, homes and pollution-treatment facilities, the government announced at a news conference.

But the comprehensiveness of the survey also resulted in stark discrepancies between some of the calculations and annual figures that the government has published in the past.

By far the biggest of these involved China’s total discharge as measured by chemical oxygen demand — the main gauge of water pollution, which measures chemical compounds in the water by checking how much oxygen they use. These discharges totaled 30.3 million tons in 2007, the census showed.