VIEWPOINT pubs.acs.org/est
The Challenge to Sustainable Development in China Revealed by “Death Villages” Heran Zheng† and Shixiong Cao*,‡ † ‡
College of Forestry, Beijing Forestry University, No. 35, Qinhuadong Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100083, China College of Economics & Management, Beijing Forestry University, No. 35, Qinhuadong Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100083, China
“D
eath village” is used to describe China’s many villages that have unusually high rates of illness or mortality caused by severe environmental pollution. Unfortunately, the number of these villages has been increasing steadily in recent decades, severely compromising the benefits of the country’s extraordinary economic boom that have been achieved since the 1970s. How common is the problem? Searching for the phrase “cancer village” (one synonym for “death village” in China) using the Baidu search site (http://www.baidu.com/) reveals nearly 500 results. Currently, China is believed to have hundreds death villages based on media reports since 2001, and these villages are scattered throughout the country (Figure 1).1 Reports in the media suggest that these villages share a single common feature: proximity to polluting enterprises, such as chemical plants, paper mills, and refineries. Because these enterprises have made no effort to detoxify their outputs, their adverse impacts on humans, livestock, plants, and the environment are increasing continuously; worse still, their toxins often accumulate in the food chain or persist in nature.2 China has the fastest-growing economy in the world, with an average annual GDP growth rate of 10%. However, this economic growth has resulted from rapidly increasing urbanization and industrialization that is sustained by the consumption of natural resources and the generation of pollutants at unsustainable rates as result of a labor-intensive economic model that uses resources r 2011 American Chemical Society
inefficiently.3 Concealed by China’s economic prosperity are the huge social and environmental problems that have resulted from this growth, including growing risks to the future economy and human health. In recent years, accidents and uncontrolled releases of pollutants have cost the people of China dearly. The State Environmental Protection Agency reported that by 2008, about 589.2 Gt of wastewater and 7.1 Mt of hazardous wastes were being released into the environment annually, and these contaminants have led to severe ecological degradation. Almost two-thirds of China’s major rivers are now seriously polluted, and approximately 86% of urban rivers are seriously degraded as a direct result of accidents that released toxic materials, as well as due to inadequate waste treatment capacity. The aggregate annual cost of environmental damage has been estimated to be between 4.5 and 18% of GDP.4 China’s government has recognized the urgency of solving these problems, and has invested 1636 billion RMB (ca. U.S.$240 billion) in environmental conservation and remediation since 2003.4 During the same period, China’s government passed more than 100 environmental policies, laws, or regulations to combat the pollution problem, and some of these efforts are widely considered to be successful, at least to some degree, but implementing these policies has not been easy.5 As a result, the direct economic losses caused by environmental contamination continue to rise, and the scope of the crisis continues to expand.2 China is now engaging in a race between accelerating environmental damage and accelerating environmental protection. If China continues its current pattern of economic development, the increasing environmental damage will jeopardize China’s socioeconomic system, with potentially significant implications for the rest of the world. In many cases, the government’s intentions have been good, but have had unfortunate side-effects. For example, the government’s strategy of reducing poverty by encouraging economic development is wise and necessary, but a lack of effective supervision mechanisms and a lack of rewards for improving environmental quality has led local governments to stress the economic aspects of development rather than improving human welfare. On the basis of this simplistic approach to judging the socioeconomic system’s performance, local governments have frequently ignored regulations designed to reduce pollution and have ignored polluting actions by local enterprises.2 The problem is exacerbated by the perceived importance of the GDP increases permitted by these enterprises, combined with the slow development of pollution
Published: November 04, 2011 9833
dx.doi.org/10.1021/es2037977 | Environ. Sci. Technol. 2011, 45, 9833–9834
Environmental Science & Technology
VIEWPOINT
Figure 1. Map of some of the “death villages” the media has reported in recent years.1 Note: The map includes 41 “cancer villages”, but the real number is likely to be many times this number.
and its slow-acting effects; death villages take many years to accumulate enough pollution to cause easily detectable problems. Rather than disturbing the status quo, governments have therefore preferred to wait until problems can no longer be denied.5 Most environmental problems, and especially those caused by hazardous industrial effluents, generally exhibit a time lag phenomenon, which makes accurate monitoring of the problem difficult during its early stages. In the absence of incontrovertible cause and effect evidence, guidelines that prioritize economic development are followed rather than guidelines that might slow development by requiring better control of pollution emissions. Problems, such as the contamination of milk powder with melamine in 2008 and the chromium contamination accident in 2011, have attracted considerable attention outside of China, but they are the tip of the iceberg; more than 30 hazardous waste accidents have occurred since 2009 alone.1,2 This provides clear evidence that unregulated urbanization and industrialization can compromise environmental sustainability and human safety. The lack of effective accountability and supervision systems continues to contribute to this situation. Because most of China’s news agencies and environmental research departments are controlled by the government and have less freedom to report politically inconvenient facts, Chinese society lacks some of the mechanisms that exist in the West to provide effective supervision and feedback.5 Moreover, those who are affected most strongly by pollution problems cannot easily protect their interests at a national or regional level, so their pleas for help are easily ignored.2 To truly begin solving these problems, local governments and industries must be held accountable for their actions, and supervision is urgently necessary to ensure that national and local environmental regulations are obeyed. Monitoring by the media and by researchers, and the freedom to report problems without fear of punishment, would help to alert the public to these problems and would make government more accountable and its actions more transparent. In particular, the participation
of all stakeholders (not just the industries and governments) in identifying and dealing with problems will be essential.
’ AUTHOR INFORMATION Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Tel.: 86-10-6233-7038. Fax: 86-10-6233-7674.
’ ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (HJ2010-3). We thank Geoffrey Hart (Montreal, Canada) for editing an early version of this paper. ’ REFERENCES (1) Deng, F. The Map of China’s “Cancer Villages”. http:// www.91sqs.com/8400/viewspace-51265.html (In Chinese), 2009. (2) Gao, Y.; Xia, J. Chromium Contamination Accident in China: Viewing Environment Policy of China. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2011, 45, 8605–8606. (3) Streets, D. G. Modeling Study of Air Pollution Due to the Manufacture of Export Goods in China’s Pearl River Delta. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2006, 40, 2099–2107. (4) Ministry of Environmental Protection. The Statistical Communique on the National Environment; State Environmental Protection Agency: Beijing, 2009. (5) Cao, S. Socioeconomic Road in Ecological Restoration in China. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2010, 44, 5328–5329.
9834
dx.doi.org/10.1021/es2037977 |Environ. Sci. Technol. 2011, 45, 9833–9834
