Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 244

reports or yearbooks of the two, major differences can be witnessed in
the amount of environmental data, the details of these data, the time
lines in all kind of monitoring programmes and the number of differ-
ent indicators that are monitored. Part of these differences is related
to the mere size of China, part also to the higher economic levels and
environmental state capacities in some of the large cities and eastern
provinces. But the wider public availability of environmental data in
China is of recent origin and was strongly triggered by the 2003 SARS
(Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) experience in which governmen-
tal agencies were held accountable for the secrecy of health data and
dangers. Increasingly, environmental data are no longer seen as sensi-
tive and are opened for the wider public, also through the old and new
media.
Nationally, the Environmental Monitoring Centre (EMC), based in
Beijing, plays an important role in data collection and data process-
ing, whereas the SEPA is responsible for environmental data publica-
tion and disclosure. With around twenty-three hundred environmental
monitoring stations in more than 350 cities, China has an extensive
monitoring network. 9 The EMC is responsible for quality control and
certification of the monitoring stations and is financed from the state
budget via SEPA (some US$8.5 million in 2005). The EMC also partly
finances local monitoring institutions (for which it receives an addi-
tional US$8.5 million annually), but only for those tasks that are related
to the national monitoring system. 10 There is very little exchange of

9

These are all governmental monitoring stations, belonging to different
governmental levels. In addition, there are more than twenty-six hundred
monitoring stations belonging to various industries. On a regular basis, data
are collected on four themes: city air quality, surface water (rivers and lakes),
drinking water and noise levels. Local monitoring data is collected at the
provincial level and then send to the National Environmental Monitoring
Center. After data processing EMC prepares annually around thirty different
environmental data reports, of which the State of the Environment and the
China Environmental Yearbook are widely available. All other reports are not
disclosed, but usually available for SEPA, the State Council and a few other
governmental institutes (interview deputy director EMC, November 2005). See
also the APEC Virtual Centre for more information on the China
environmental monitoring stations (http://apec-vc.cestt.org.cn).

10

For instance, Beijing has twenty-two monitoring stations, of which only seven
are included in - and thus financed by - the national monitoring network.
Waste monitoring, for instance, is not included on a regular basis in national
environmental monitoring.