China's 11th Five-Year Plan and the Environment: Reducing SO₂ Emissions

The Pearl River Delta Regional Air Quality Monitoring Network - Regional Collaborative Efforts on Joint Air Quality Management

“…It has been gaining the momentum on cutting SO 2 emission since the 11 th FYP. Significant efforts were made including tightening motor vehicle emission standards, installation of flue gas desulfurization facilities in large-scale thermal power plants and closing down the small and inefficient power plants of 50GW in China (Cao et al, 2009). Both the 11 th and 12 th FYPs accorded a high priority on improving the citizens' overall well-being through, for example, education opportunities, healthcare and living environment improvement.…”

An analysis of the driving forces behind pollutant emission reduction in Chinese industry

“…Since the "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" from 2006 to 2009, the Chinese government and enterprises have invested 1375 billion RMB to reduce pollution by industry (Cao et al, 2009). For example, coal-burning power stations with desulfurization facilities have recently increased their capacity by 411 million kilowatts, and the proportion of coalburning power stations with desulfurization facilities increased from 12% in 2005 to 71% in 2009.…”

“…Meanwhile, China maintained rapid economic growth; growth in gross domestic product (GDP) achieved an average increase of 11.4% from 2005 to 2010, a cumulative increase of 71.6%. This is a further indication that the amount of SO 2 and COD emitted per unit of GDP has decreased significantly (Cao et al, 2009).…”

“…On the other hand, in order to reduce pollution emissions and prevent continual environmental deterioration, three key measures for pollution reductiondEngineering Emission Reduction (EER, or emission reduction by engineering measures), Structure Emission Reduction (SrER, emission reduction through economic structure change) and Supervision Emission Reduction (SuER, emission reduction through the strengthening of management measures)d were implemented in 1996 (Cao et al, 2009;Pasche, 2002;Qi et al, 2011). Through solid efforts, China successfully reduced the total amount of sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) emitted from 2005 to 2010.…”

Chinese Sulphur Dioxide Emissions and Local Environment Pollution

“…Unfortunately during this period SO 2 emissions have increased by about 28% in the 10 th Five-Year Plan (2001 (National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), 2010). Desulphurization devices are required to be installed in most power plants, which had 52% of total coal consumption in China (NBS, 2009) and has effectively reduced SO 2 emission in China (Cao et al, 2009). SO 2 emissions began to decrease in China after 2006 mainly due to the wide application of flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) devices in power plants (Lu et al, 2010).…”