Focus interview丨How is this visible and audible indicator accomplished?
In the 13th Five-Year Plan, there are 9 binding indicators for environmental protection, among which air quality and water quality are most concerned by the people.
How about the completion of the two indicators of PM2.5 concentration, which reflects air quality, and the proportion of inferior Class V water bodies, which reflects water quality?
The plan requires that the PM2.5 concentration of 262 cities that do not meet the standard will drop by 18% within five years.
By the end of 2019, the PM2.5 concentration of these cities will be reduced by 23.1%, and the target will be achieved ahead of schedule.
Regarding water quality, the plan requires that the proportion of water bodies inferior to Grade V within 5 years is less than 5%.
At the end of 2019, 3.4% was achieved, and the target was also achieved ahead of schedule.
Corresponding to the changes in the data are intuitive feelings: In the past five years, the sky has become bluer and the water has become clearer.
So how did these changes come about?
At the Environmental Protection Command Center of Tangshan City, Hebei Province, Wu Jianjun, Director of the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Division of Tangshan Ecological Environment Bureau, is analyzing recent PM2.5 monitoring data with colleagues.
The data shows that the average PM2.5 concentration in Tangshan City is 38 micrograms/m3 during the 8 days of the 11th Double Festival this year. So far, the annual average concentration is 48 micrograms/m3.
Wu Jianjun said that at the beginning of the "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan", this figure was hard to think of.
The reason why I dare not think about such an achievement is because they face too many difficulties.
Tangshan is a traditional resource-based heavy and chemical industrial city, built for coal and thriving for steel.
This heavy industrial structure, while supporting the city’s rapid economic development, has also caused serious pollution problems.
In 2015, the city's average PM2.5 concentration reached 85 micrograms/cubic meter, 2.43 times the national standard.
Wu Jianjun said: “The municipal party committee and the municipal government have set up a leading group for the prevention and control of air pollution, hired a team of experts, conducted research and analysis, and conducted joint consultations with multiple departments. It is clear that the main reason for the high PM2.5 index in Tangshan is that there are many heavy polluting enterprises. There are many small and medium-sized enterprises, and the industrial structure is of high energy consumption and high emissions, so how to reduce production capacity and reduce corporate emissions is the biggest difficulty and problem we face."
During the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, the PM2.5 concentration of 262 cities that did not meet the standard will drop by 18% within 5 years. Although the difficulties faced by different regions and other conditions are different, the difficulties faced by Tangshan are in the whole country. Very representative.
Liu Bingjiang, Director of the Department of Atmospheric Environment of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, said: “Behind the PM2.5 is energy. Our country is based on heavy chemical industry, coal-based energy, and road-based transportation, and it is heavy. There is no precedent to force structural adjustment through only two binding indicators, so it is difficult to force structural adjustment through."
Yan Gang, deputy dean of the Environmental Planning Institute of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, said: "The hardest thing to gnaw is to promote the management of scattered coal, the comprehensive rectification of scattered and polluting enterprises, the resolution of excess capacity, the promotion of the'public (road) transfer to railway (road)', and the implementation of coal Total consumption control. These measures are all structural adjustment measures. Although the benefits are significant, these measures are difficult to achieve overnight. They are all systematic projects."
Structural emission reduction means to shut down and eliminate high-energy, high-polluting backward production capacity and enterprises. This involves the transformation of enterprises, the placement of relevant personnel, and may also harm the economic interests of some departments and localities.
Although the pressure, resistance, and difficulties are great, the Tangshan Municipal Party Committee and Government recognizes that the "13th Five-Year Plan" goal is a hard task that must be completed. Solving the problem of environmental pollution is a mountain that must be overcome in the transformation and upgrading of the city. A hurdle.
Zhang Jianye, Deputy Secretary of the Party Group and Deputy Director of the Tangshan Ecological Environment Bureau of Hebei Province, said: “We must not sacrifice the environment in exchange for GDP growth and fiscal and tax revenue. We must be determined to break our arms and use hard measures to complete hard tasks to ensure that air pollution control is truly true. Seeing practical results, I will lower PM2.5 and return the people to the blue sky and white clouds."
At the end of 2015, the central government proposed supply-side structural reforms, clarifying the target tasks of removing 155 million tons of excess capacity in steel and 820 million tons in coal, which provided opportunities for Tangshan to conduct atmospheric governance.
In accordance with a series of national work requirements, Tangshan launched a general attack on the source of pollution in advancing the supply-side structural reform, and successively launched the three major battles of reducing production capacity, ultra-low governance and relocation.
The steel industry requires high investment, and a set of equipment costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Every time a ton of backward production capacity is reduced, huge determination and effort are required.
Wang Heng, Director of the Industrial Development Department of the Development and Reform Commission of Tangshan City, Hebei Province, said: “The city and county levels jointly dispatched working groups to enter the company, repeatedly preached policies, and worked patiently and meticulously. Finally, the company was shut down and the task of reducing production capacity was completed on schedule. 5 Over the past years, Tangshan City has reduced the total steelmaking capacity of 33.328 million tons and 21.93 million tons of ironmaking capacity; the number of iron and steel joint ventures has been reduced from 40 in 2015 to 30."
The production capacity has finally been suppressed, and the PM2.5 concentration has also declined.
However, since the second half of 2017, Tangshan's environmental protection department has found depressed that there is still a big gap between reaching the standard value.
How can the concentration of PM2.5 be reduced from microgram to microgram?
Wu Jianjun said: "Industry such as iron and steel is an important pillar of Tangshan's economic and social development. Enterprises still need to develop. It is impossible to shut down all of them. New methods must be found if the indicators are not met."
At this time, my country's economic development has entered a new normal, and high-quality development requirements have pointed out a new direction for Tangshan's economic and social development, making Tangshan realize that environmental issues are inseparable from urban development and must be reformed and innovated.
Since 2017, Tangshan City has carried out the ultra-low emission transformation of the iron and steel industry, successively investing about 21 billion yuan in iron and steel enterprises to upgrade the original treatment facilities.
Shougang Qian'an Iron and Steel Company has been a pioneer in the transformation of the environmental protection system and became the first domestic steel company to achieve ultra-low emissions throughout the entire process.
In the second half of 2018, Tangshan launched the "Pollution Retreat Action" to promote the distribution of steel, ceramics, and thermal power to coastal ports.
On September 7 this year, HBIS Tangsteel New District was officially put into operation in Laoting Economic Development Zone, and the new steel plant achieved ultra-low emissions throughout the entire process.
Continuously climbing over the hurdles have seen results. From January to September this year, Tangshan has reached the standard for 177 days, an increase of 58 days over the same period in 2015.
Tangshan's battle to defend the blue sky can be said to be a microcosm of national atmospheric governance over the past five years.
The blue sky of the "13th Five-Year Plan" is hard-won, and there are also many difficulties in making the water clearer.
Take the Fenhe River governance as an example. In order to complete the 13th Five-Year Plan, Taiyuan City in Shanxi Province fought a tough battle.
There are 13 national examination sections in the Fenhe River Basin. In 2015, 8 sections were inferior V-category water bodies. According to the requirements of the "13th Five-Year Plan", it is not easy to achieve the goal of less than 6 inferior V-category water bodies in 2020.
The Taiyuan section of the Fenhe River is 188 kilometers long. Due to historical reasons, a large amount of untreated domestic sewage is directly discharged into the Fenhe River, making the Taiyuan section of the Fenhe River a long-term heavily polluted water body.
The Xiaodongliu River is one of the nine main tributaries of the Fen River in the urban area of Taiyuan and is called the "Nine Rivers".
The water quality of the Taiyuan section of the Fen River is mostly related to the "Nine Rivers". The former "Nine Rivers" were almost all black and smelly water bodies, which seriously polluted the Fen River.
The most fundamental reason for the black and smelly water body is the environmental problem of the direct discharge of urban sewage, which is universal in every city.
It is understood that at the beginning of the 13th Five-Year Plan period, there were more than 2,800 rivers in black and smelly waters across the country.
In order to solve this stubborn disease, during the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, the state has increased its infrastructure construction efforts.
Wang Dong, deputy chief engineer of the Environmental Planning Institute of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, said: “Cities have begun to increase the construction of drainage pipe networks and the transformation of rain and sewage diversion. From 2016 to 2018, my country’s sewage treatment capacity has increased by 32 million cubic meters. M/day, the drainage pipe network has increased by nearly 200,000 kilometers."
Taiyuan also focused on the management of the Fen River on the comprehensive management of the "Nine Rivers" and the centralized collection and treatment of sewage.
In 2017, Taiyuan City began to rectify the Xiaodongliu River, which is also the difficult point in the comprehensive management of Taiyuan's "Nine Rivers". The difficulties of cleaning up the river silt, relocating high-voltage towers, transforming pipelines, and underpassing railways need to be solved one by one.
The "Jiuhe" comprehensive treatment project was fully completed in 2018. The newly built rainwater pipelines and sewage pipelines will directly drain the domestic sewage from the "Jiuhe" Fen River into the municipal sewage pipeline network, and finally be processed by the sewage treatment plant. Discharge greatly improved the water quality of Fenhe River.
But after that, new problems reappeared.
In order to solve the problem of insufficient sewage treatment capacity, Taiyuan City initiated the first phase of construction of the Fendong Sewage Treatment Plant.
However, by the end of December last year, there were still about 50,000 tons of sewage that could not be treated every day and was directly discharged into the Fen River.
This year is the closing year of the "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan" and there is not much time left for Taiyuan.
On May 15 this year, the first-stage two-step project with a daily processing capacity of 200,000 tons was finally put into operation, filling the last shortcoming of Taiyuan's sewage treatment.
Hard work pays off.
In June of this year, all 13 national examination sections in the Fenhe River Basin dropped out of the inferior V category, and the pollution problem of the Fenhe River that plagued local people was fundamentally solved.
Up to now, 8 of the 9 ecological indicators in the 13th Five-Year Plan have been completed ahead of schedule.
There are only good days, because there are still more than two months to go before the end of the year.
Wan Jun, deputy director of the Comprehensive Department of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, said: "The proportion of good days in cities above the prefecture level is advancing as planned. From the preliminary data from January to September this year, the proportion of good days has reached 87.2%, an increase of 5.7 compared to the same period last year. It is expected that the goal of ecological environment protection can be fully realized."
It seems that these "13th Five-Year Plan" indicators are just a few small numbers, but these small numbers have brought big changes to the people, and behind them are big projects.
When PM2.5 drops from one microgram to one microgram, behind it may be the removal of tens of millions of tons of outdated production capacity; the water in the small river becomes clear day by day, and behind it may be the construction and transformation of dozens of kilometers of drainage pipe network.
In the past five years, all localities and departments worked together to manage, and everyone climbed through the hurdles together, and even the strong man broke his wrist, and only then has the clear water and blue sky of today.
Producer丨Liu Nian, Guo Feng, Huang Jie
Editor丨Liu Ning Song Yunyi
Video丨Zhang Yuhu Song Zhenyun
Editor in charge丨Wenna Wang Qibing
Editing丨Xing Yongyue Miao Jialiang