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Beijing Wins the 2022 C40 Cities Bloomberg Philanthropies Awards in "United to Clean the Air We Breathe" Category
Date: 2022-10-30
Source: Beijing Daily
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Recently, the 2022 C40 World Mayors Summit opened in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The project of "Phasing out coal in Beijing's heating system" won the 2022 C40 Cities Bloomberg Philanthropies Awards in "United to clean the air we breathe" category, making Beijing the only Chinese city to receive the award.

The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40 Cities) is an international, city-based, non-government organization dedicated to promoting the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, active climate change response, and the improvement of the health and well-being of urban residents in cities around the world, and has covered nearly 100 major cities worldwide. The award recognized the remarkable achievement and extraordinary leadership of Beijing in air cleaning and carbon reduction initiatives, particularly in reducing emissions, improving air quality and protecting public health.

Statistics show that the annual average PM2.5 concentration of Beijing decreased to 33 micrograms per cubic meter in 2021, down 63.1% from 2013, and 29 micrograms per cubic meter as of October 18th this year. On the opening day of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the PM2.5 concentration was as low as 1 microgram per cubic meter, marking the best level ever monitored over the same period of the year. "Military parade blue", "APEC blue", and "Congress blue" have gradually become the "normal blue".

Behind this huge change, the coal-free heating system played a crucial role. According to a person in charge from Beijing Municipal Ecology and Environment Bureau, Beijing has the largest heating area in northern China. And as Beijing for long relied on coal as the major energy for heating, coal burning used to be the second largest source of PM2.5. Since 2016, Beijing has continuously carried out the "2013-2017 Clean Air Action Plan" and the "Three-year Action Plan for Cleaner Air 2018-2020", promoting parallel progress in coal-free centralized heating system and coal-free decentralized heating system. Up to this point, Beijing has completed the clean energy transition in a total of 6300 units and 23,500 t/h of coal-fired boilers, and more than 1.3 million households of residential heating. All coal-fired power plants have either been shut down or realized clean power generation. The implementation of these plans successfully reduced pollution. For instance, Beijing's sulfur dioxide concentration has been stabilized at single digit for years. In addition, these plans also improved the city's energy structure, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by more than 10 million tons per year. In 2021, the carbon intensity per 10,000 Yuan GDP of Beijing was 0.33 tons, maintaining the best level in all provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) in China.

In recent years, Beijing has actively participated in the global governance to tackle climate change. Through the multilateral communication platforms of such intergovernmental organizations as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and NGOs, Beijing has actively introduced to the international society its achievements made in green development, addressing climate change, and biodiversity conservation, and shared its experience in urban governance.

Beijing's practice contributed wisdom and solution to the promotion of global green development. In 2019, A Review of 20 Years' Air Pollution Control in Beijing published by UNEP hailed the dramatic improvement in Beijing's air quality. The Review believes that Beijing's efforts in improving air quality have provided worthy insights for cities of developing countries facing similar challenges, and the coal-free transition in its heating system is one of the significant measures.

(Reporters: Fan Junsheng, Yang Qi)