02.09.10, 02:29 AM EST
Associated Press
BEIJING -- China said Tuesday that its first national pollution census has mapped more than 5 million sources of industrial, residential and agricultural waste throughout the country, but that the results won't be publicly available for now.
The world's largest polluter now has a year to use the results to shape its next five-year environmental plan. Ministries are also studying the possibility of an environmental tax, China's vice minister of environmental protection, Zhang Lijun, told a news conference.
Detailed data from the first pollution census will be released to the public "in the future," Zhang said.
In the meantime, the results remain out of the view of an increasingly vocal Chinese public. Only the government and officials at relevant ministries have access to it.
"This is an incredibly ambitious source survey of pollutants," said Deborah Seligsohn, principal adviser for the World Resources Institute on China's climate and energy issues. "In terms of giving them an excellent basis for being able to manage and track what they're doing, it's a huge step forward."
The survey puts China ahead of other developing countries in having a detailed map of who is polluting and where.
The census, which took two years and 570,000 staff to complete, also includes agricultural pollution for the first time in China's pollution studies.
"That's huge," Seligsohn said. "Many challenges China faces in terms of water quality come from organic pollution rather than from chemicals."
China's database of 5.9 million pollution sources included in the census is not yet publicly available - which environmental groups picked up on right away.
"We urge the government to immediately establish a strong platform through which the public could easily access a wide range of pollution data," Sze Pang Cheung, campaign director for Greenpeace China, said in a statement.
Opening up the survey results would let the Chinese public monitor the country's biggest polluters and the worst polluted areas, said Yu Jie, head of policy and research programs for The Climate Group China.
"In this regard, it would be big progress. But if those data are only open to governments, then this civil society function doesn't work," she said.
Chinese citizens are more and more outspoken about environmental issues, with a number of recent protests of proposed incinerator projects in the south.
Others have gone ahead and mapped major pollution sources on their own, posting the results online.
Despite the wealth of new information, Zhang said "basically, there was nothing that surprised us."
It was not clear whether China would conduct the survey regularly.
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