CHINA:China has stopped the public release of an official study that puts a cost on environmental damage to the country, and a top scientist blamed official reluctance to confront pollution as the reason.
The Beijing Newsreported that the release of a report on "green GDP", which measures the cost of environmental damage relative to gross domestic product, in 2005 had been "indefinitely postponed".
"Taking out the costs of environmental damage would lead to a huge fall in the quality of economic growth in some areas," said Wang Jinnan, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning, who had a senior role in the project.
"At present many areas still place GDP above all else, and when such thinking dominates, the size of resistance to a green GDP can well be imagined," Mr Wang told the paper.
The study was first compiled last year and showed air and water pollution cost China 512 billion yuan (€49 billion) in 2004, or 3.05 per cent of GDP, a figure one State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) official described as "shocking". The figure for 2005 was tipped to be higher.
It is the latest row over the reporting of environmental problems in China, where there is growing anger over the rising environmental cost of economic growth.
Much of the problem is bureaucratic. Local officials are judged largely on their ability to improve growth, and many local governments resisted the green GDP programme because they were worried about damaging their reputation.
The provinces lobbied SEPA and the National Bureau of Statistics not to release the data.
The report for 2005 was supposed to have been released in March. There was also an unusually public row in the media between SEPA and the statistics bureau over the report. Some government figures have questioned the validity of green GDP as a measure of the ecological damage relative to economic growth.
The Paris-based OECD criticised China's environmental record this month, saying half of its cities do not have clean drinking water and more people are suffering from respiratory diseases because of air pollution.
China reportedly asked the World Bank not to publish estimates of the number of premature Chinese deaths each year from polluted air and water because of concerns over social unrest.
The bank study concluded that 460,000 Chinese died prematurely each year from water and air pollution and about 300,000 more died from indoor toxins.
In response, Zhou Jian, deputy minister of SEPA, said: "It is a very complex issue to analyse the impact of pollution on human health. Without a common scientific methodology in the world, any survey on environment and health is not persuasive."