Open Data for a Green Society

Editor's note: In the process of urbanization and industrialization, there is always a need to balance the needs for economic growth and environmental protection, hence companies are often caught cutting corners to gain price advantages, says Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE). How to solve the problem? In the latest season of China Talk, he will share with us how data transparency has helped the green transition of companies and built a low-carbon society in China.

Hello, welcome to China Talk. My name is Ma Jun. I am the founding director of IPE, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs.Today I want to share with you how a map app has helped clean up China's air and green the supply chain of some of the largest multinational and local brands.

A decade ago, Beijing had a reputation as the capital of smog. People who lived there at that time would tell you it's no exaggeration. There were many days of heavy pollution. On the worst days, the smog was so thick we couldn't even see the buildings across the street, and planes couldn't take off or land. Think about hundreds of millions of our people exposed to that level of pollution. That was the situation 10 years ago.

But 10 years later, Beijing's annual average of PM2.5, one of the key criteria to gauge air quality,dropped from nearly 90 to 30 micrograms in 2022, and the average level across major cities dropped by 57 percent across China.

How did that happen?

China's pollution problem resulted from its growth model in three decades of massive urbanization and industrialization. With enforcement of environmental rules and regulations weak,the cost of violations often too low,companies often cut corners to gain price advantages in the market.Years of research made me understand that issues of such a magnitude cannot be addressed without extensive public intervention.And the prerequisite for that is access to information.

From 2006,we began to compile corporate monitoring data into a database to record company's environmental violations. We started with only 2,000 cases of violations that year.Through the process, we witnessed a historic progress made in China's environmental transparency, particularly over the past ten years, with the number of enforcement records topping 2.9 million.

In 2014, China began to require thousands of major polluters to disclose their online monitoring data to the public every one to two hours. It's the first of its kind in the world. To make these data accessible to the public, we launched the Blue Map app.At a time when everyone was paying attention to air and water quality, our app was attracting large number of users.

Through our app, people can access the records of emitters, then sharing their information on social media, tagging the official accounts of local environmental agencies.

Sounds brutal? But it worked. Let me explain how…

On our app, each individual factory – and there are tens of thousands of them – is color coded. Blue and green for "good," red and yellow for "bad." The color codes are derived from the violations on record and confirmed public reports. 

When we first launched our Blue Map app, there were many large companies in China that exceeded emissions standards. For example, there were a lot of red dots in Shandong province, one of the largest industrial bases in China.

One day, we got a call for a meeting with the head of the Shandong EPB, the Provincial Environmental Protection Bureau.As I took the train, I felt a little nervous as we put many "red dot" factories on our map in that province. I thought I would again be pressured to remove some of the information from our app as it happened before.

But this official's opening remark really surprised me. He said, "Look, there are 100 million people in our province, and we burn 400 million tons of coal. Now I'm asked to clean up the PM2.5, and I don't think I can deliver without the understanding and support of the people."

He said our Blue Map app could actually be of great help because it's based on science and monitoring data. In another word, instead of getting a dressing down, we were accepted as part of the solution to the pollution problem. Eventually the provincial, municipal and county agencies in Shandong all set up their social media accounts. Through these accounts, they can follow and track each petition and complaints posted by our Blue Map users and then urge major emitters to change behavior.

While the annual readings of PM2.5 continue to decline, the concentration of CO2 keeps rising around the world, causing global warming and more extreme weather events such as heatwaves, floodings, droughts and wildfires. We believe that the rich experiences in tackling air pollution shall be learned in our new fight against climate change.

Since the world came together to sign the Paris Agreement, there are 9,000 companies and financial institutions that have pledged to net zero emissions, including those that outsource their production to China and whose supply chain accounts for the bulk of their carbon footprint.But when we look at it, not many of them are actually implementing their global commitments locally.

We hope to push brands to close the gap between their global commitments and local implementation. I still remember when we first launched our Green Choice Initiative in 2007, many companies claimed "in China, we don't know who is polluting, so we would buy from the cheapest."But I told them I have a map that can help them figure out who is polluting and who's not.

It contributes to the improvement of not only air but water quality. In comparison with 2006, the year when IPE was founded, the proportion of monitoring points of rivers and lakes reporting worse than Category V, or the lowest water quality, has dropped from 28 percent to around one percent in recent years.

More recently, many brands began to drive their suppliers using the digital accounting solutions to measure and disclose their carbon emission and set target for reduction. Last year the total volume of supply chain CO2 disclosed reached 62 million tons.

China's experiences and solutions in environmental and climate actions have been noticed increasingly by other countries. And we have been invited to ASEAN countries, most recently to Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines to share our experiences. We have also been approached by a group of NGOs in Africa with the idea of building a pan-African app to track the environmental performance of companies there.

Some international companies now also want to apply our data-based solutions in managing their supply chains elsewhere. Recently, one such brand started to require its suppliers in Cambodia to go through a similar process to disclose their emission data.

I think in the globalized economy, the environmental monitoring and supervision should also go global.We are ready to share our digital solutions and work with partners globally to prevent another round of pollution transfer.  

But remember, it all started with the disclosure of data and the support of different stakeholders that are willing to make greener choices in their life to realize a healthy and sustainable growth for all humanities.

Thank you.

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