Three Chinese cities failing to reduce air pollution have been banned to launch new projects

Beijing. May 5. Silkroadnews - China has ordered three northern cities to stop approving new projects that would increase pollution after they failed to meet air quality targets this past winter, South China Morning Post reported.
The mayors of Handan in Hebei province and Jincheng and Yangquan in Shanxi province were given the orders after being summoned to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment in Beijing, report reads. The meeting was held after the cities failed to reduce the level of dangerous particles in the air, known as PM2.5 between October 2017 and March of this year.
Last October China launched a campaign to reduce average concentrations of PM 2.5 by 10-25% in 28 northern cities to hit the air quality targets in 2013-2017.
Although Handan was ordered to reduce traffic, cut industrial output and use of coal to reduce PM 2.5 by 20% over this period, it was able to achieve a decline of 15.7% only.
In the city, which is one of major metallurgical and chemical production center, the average concentration of PM 2.5 increased 4.9% to 86 micrograms per cubic meter in 2017, with an increase of 19.7% in one of the districts.
The mayor of the city Wang Litong said that Handan will reduce steelmaking capacity by another 300,000 tons, coal production by 1.1 million tons and coal-based energy production by 268 megawatts by August. He also said there were three officials fired and 14 other officials received warnings.
All three cities have been ordered to develop a detailed plan to rectify the situation, which they must submit to the Ministry of Environmental Protection within 20 days.
The mayor of Jincheng, Liu Feng, said that the city, which is the center of the coal and gas industry, will sacrifice GDP growth to curb air pollution, noting that Jincheng’s gross domestic product fell 9% as a result of production decline in the first quarter, while fixed-asset investment slumped 41%, the agency wrote.
China’s ministry of ecology and environment now has the authority to hold officials accountable for non-compliance with requirements relating to air pollution.
More than two thousand local government officials have already been prosecuted after they were found to have violated environmental norms during large-scale nationwide inspections conducted by order of Beijing in 2016.
While hundreds of officials were given official reprimands, only a handful were actually fired or prosecuted, though.