REINHARD KRAUSE / REUTERS

DON'T BREATHE: Beijing hosts the Olympics in less than four years, but the city's air remains dangerously unhealthy

Choking on Growth
	Rapid economic development has led to filthy air. The good news: this is a mess that can be cleaned up
	By Bryan Walsh Hong Kong

Posted Monday, December 13, 2004; 20:00 HKT
Jan Morris, writing in her 1988 book on Hong Kong, describes Victoria Peak, the island's highest point, as a place where "the hills of Guangdong stand blue in the distance ... you see the city itself precipitously below you. The early sun catches the windows of Kowloon across the water." But if you had visited the Peak on Sept. 14, when Hong Kong experienced a record-breaking day of air pollution, you would have seen a view that was little more than a smudge. The skyscrapers could be glimpsed only through a veil of noxious smog, sunlight did not glint from windows and as for the hills of Guangdong—they were left entirely to an onlooker's imagination.

Days like this are becoming increasingly common, with 2004 likely to be Hong Kong's worst year for air pollution since the government began daily measurements in 1995. On August 19, visibility was so bad that eight ships had minor collisions in smoggy Victoria Harbor. The city has already had more than 80 days this year when at least one air-monitoring station registered a "very high" reading, compared with just 53 days in 2003, and the level of tiny, breathable particulates in the air is frequently up to twice the safety standard in the U.S. "We're losing ground," warns Dr. Anthony Hedley, chair of community medicine at the University of Hong Kong, where he studies the effects of air pollution. "I think we're headed into the Dark Ages."

Yet here's the most shocking thing about Hong Kong's pollution: by the standards of most Asian cities, the place is as clean as a whistle. In nearby Guangzhou, fine-particulate levels are up to five times U.S. safety limits. In Beijing, citizens were warned to stay indoors for three days last week as heavy smog blanketed the capital and delayed hundreds of flights; in October, Beijing's local environmental agency declared a "state of emergency" over the failure to meet its air-quality objectives for the year, apparently hoping to shame polluters into cleaning up their acts. Meanwhile, according to a study released by the Calcutta-based Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute, 2 out of 5 residents of New Delhi now suffer from health disorders connected to poor air quality, and in Bombay the air is so thick with pollutants that breathing it is the equivalent of smoking 21/2 packs of cigarettes a day. Acid rain from China has scorched the walls of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. And a gray cocktail of carbon, sulfur and ash the size of the continental U.S. drifts in a holding pattern 3 km above much of South Asia.

The level of air pollution in Asia isn't just a matter of aesthetics. It's one of life and death. According to the World Health Organization, two-thirds of the 800,000 premature deaths caused by air pollution globally occur in Asia. Long-term exposure to air pollution can raise the risk of pulmonary and heart disease, irritate underlying respiratory conditions and potentially take months or more off a healthy life-span. Days when visitors can't see across Victoria Harbor grab the headlines, but major health problems can be caused over many years by lower pollutant doses. "The average days are the days that are causing the damage," says Hedley. "This is a systematic problem, not an occasional problem."

Westerners with any memory know what Asia is going through. As economies in Europe and North America modernized from 1800 to 1950, they spilled Dickensian levels of muck into the air—until legislation and cleaner technology eventually eradicated most of London's pea-soupers and Los Angeles' smogs. In fact, there are some encouraging signs that Asia may be able to avoid the Western fate of polluting first, cleaning up later. Since the 1970s, Tokyo has drastically improved its air quality, thanks to tough emissions standards and enforcement. In New Delhi, a determined judiciary and committed activists are beginning to turn around what has been one of the world's most polluted cities. In China, some concerned citizens are filing lawsuits to force their government to live up to its often hollow environmental pledges. Environmentalists and policymakers from around the region are meeting in Agra, India, this week at the Better Air Quality workshop to plan the way to a cleaner Asia, but that will only happen if governments are willing to make clean air a priority. "Asia can't develop in a business-as-usual model," says Dr. Bob Watson, the World Bank's chief scientist on climate change. Making Asia's air breathable again will take political will, international cooperation and economic sacrifice—but failure would be a disaster.

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