TACKLING air pollution for just a few months at a time, as the Chinese government did during the Beijing Olympics last year, will not drastically improve air quality.
The plan was to cut factory emissions by 30 per cent and traffic by up to 70 per cent in the hope of reducing Beijing’s haze.
from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and colleagues measured light reflected from the Earth’s surface with NASA’s Terra satellite from July to September 2008. After allowing for humidity and rainfall, they found that “aerosol optical thickness” – a measure of the concentration of atmospheric particles – decreased by only 10 to 15 per cent compared with the same periods in 2002 to 2007 (Geophysical Research Letters, in press).
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“It’s a little bit disappointing,” says , an aerosols expert from the Met Office at Exeter, UK, but he is not surprised because the cuts were relatively local and aerosols can travel far. Still, there’s no data on whether China met its goals.
For the 2012 London games, plans are afoot to study particles moving over, in and out of the city.