Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshatarrati. This week pollution, power and public data. As someone living in Europe, everything about China seems big. It's a big country with a big population, with a big carbon footprint. But it's also a country that, with its state led capitalism and top down political order, has built a big lead in green technologies. So to talk about China on a climate podcast, you necessarily have to pick a slice, and for today's conversation, we're going
to focus on local pollution of air and water. In a democracy, citizens are free to criticize the government and call out injustices such as toxic air and poisoned waters. It's not so easy to do it in China, but that's exactly what my yesterday. Mar June has built his career doing his work documenting stunning amounts of air and water pollution with the help of citizens, has made it possible for people to talk about it and even make
change happen. Mar June began his career as a reporter for the South China Morning Post in the nineteen nineties. Traveling the country, he saw the impact that becoming the factory of the world is doing to China's water supply rivers were running dry or running black. Mar Jun wrote a book called China's Water Crisis, chronicling the problem. It was a wake up call, garnering comparisons to what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did to the environmental movement in the
US in the nineteen sixties. Identifying a problem is one thing. Mar Jun wanted to do something about it, and he did that not through writing, but by founding a nonprofit, the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs, a low key name for an organization that was about to do something
very bold. Using data from Looke governments, his team compiled and published online databases off water pollution and air pollution, in some cases even tracing the pollution to its source, and even with internet access, could see how pollution was changing in their homes over time. Environmentalists, journalist citizens, even people in corporations wanted to make their supply chains cleaner.
The issue was quite sensitive. You we are working on something that either transparency and public participation, none of this is quite in the DNA of our culture. So there was suspicion. There was pushback.
In twenty fourteen, China instituted a war against pollution, and it has made the air less toxic and the water cleaner, but there is still a long way to go. I sat down with mar June to talk about why founding a nonprofit was such an important part of the solution, what the world gets wrong about China's approach to climate change, and how he used data to supur action in the factory of the world. My June, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
You began your career as an investigative journalist. How did you get started on that beat, something which is difficult to pull off in China?
Yeah, that work was not easy, but it's quite rewarding, you know. It was that during that period of.
Time, and we're talking nineteen eighties.
Yeah, nineteen nineties. That job gave me the chance to travel, you know, in different parts of China, and I was struck by the environmental damage, including the damage all of our water resources. You know, some rivers dried up, and some lakes got so polluted, and the fresh water ecosystem is being compromised. So I put it into a book, China's Water Crisis.
Yeah, which has been compared to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which is plished in the US to talk about similar problems.
Yeah, it was a relatively early in China to write about this issue. But I have my greatest admiration to retro Carson, and my book is no comparison.
It's difficult to do the work of criticizing government, of pointing out problems that the government, you know, should ideally be dealing with. Was there any backlash from the government.
At that time? It was not as easy because at that time, you know, China is going through the enormous industrialization and most of the local government officials they put GDP growth rate ahead of environmental protection. And with us, you know, talking about we need to factor in the environmental impact and try to clean up. Sometimes, you know, there was this question, suspicions and even pushback not just from the factories that we tridle supervised, but also sometimes
from the local agencies contacts. So a lot of pressure.
Yeah, So you write a book as an investigative journalist and it's clearly widely read and has an impact on focusing the government to do more about the water crisis. But then you give up journalism and you get into advocacy. What was that transition and why did you make it. Yeah.
After the book was published, I think it reached some targeted readers, including some of the officials from the agencies in charge, and most of the readers say that they agree with the conclusion that if we would not take action, we're going to face water challenges and even crisis. But they just want to know how to solve the problem. They You know, I've been challenged over and over again until I believe that it was time for me to
try to delve deeper into this issue. You know, the media means to the mission is to identify the problem instead of being this solution provided.
So you wanted to try and solve the problem, and you did that by creating a non governmental organization, which also isn't easy to create and operate in China, right.
It was not easy.
Yeah.
The reason I decided to create this organization eventually is the course about five six years of further study into this issue, I found that the root course behind all our environmental damage is very complicated, complex, and the magnitude is so big. So the problem cannot be overcome without extensive participation from the public, and the prerequisite for that
is access to information. And at that time, there was no other organizations focused on this transparency issue, so I decided to build this organization.
So you founded the Institute of Public and Environment Affairs. And it was at a time when in the foreign press at least, the one issue that came up with China was smog. Beijing was covered in deadly air pollution, and there was clearly outreage even within the country around how bad smog was getting. But even though you could see the pollution, you didn't always know how bad the pollution was because there was no measurement being done around it.
So how did you go around trying to convince the government to share data that would make them look bad.
Yeah, when we started, the pollution in some way reached some sort of climax. I still remember that year when we got started, two thousand and six, some twenty eight percent of the nationally monitored river sections and lakes were in a category worse than category five. That means it's
basically running black good for no use. Three hundred million people, mostly in the in the rural countryside, exposed to this unsafe water, and in the in the cities, hundreds of millions are exposed to smog, which is getting increasingly more severe until you know, as you mentioned around twenty eleven, you know, for a whole week of time, the smog got so bad that airplane would not be able to land and we could not see clearly the building next to our own office, and so you know, people started
raising this question is it just natural foggy days or smog and we haven't started earlier, you know, to try to identify the course of the problem, so by publishing not just the environmental quality data but the whole you know, compliance records of those emission sources. And the issue was quite sensitive, and you know, we are working on something that either transparency and public participation, none of this is
quite in the DNA of our culture. So there was suspicion, there was pushback, and so we decided that we're going to start from the government source. So whenever there's a pressure coming, we can show that there was a link to a government document or website.
And that was the basis of creating the water pollution map.
Yes, that was the principle for us to develop the first the water pollution map and then extend it to
air and soil other issues. And it may sounds kind of safer, but on the other hand, there was not much government source environmental information available, so we decided we need to develop an index with our partner and our DC, you know, develop the Pollution Information Transparency Index and used that to assess the performance of one hundred and twenty cities for more than ten years of time and during the process, of course identify the gaps but also the
best practice, and eventually, you know, we witness an historic expansion of the environmental transparency in China. You know, first year, we started with only two thousand records of violations by the companies that we can compile, but today we have more than two point seven million of them in our database.
And so what do you have to convince the government to allow you to do that? Because it is going to make the government look bad at least at the start. Maybe once you improve the pollution things will look better. What did you have to do to convince the government?
Yeah, first we got pushed back from those corporations we put on the polluters list, this so called blacklist. Some of them will come to us directly in sometimes very unhappy, and some of them would have approached to their contacts
in local government and give us some hard time. But the way for us to convince them it is first, you know, to make sure that it all coming from credible sources, and then develop the path towards solution, to showcase that we're trying to help where we're not their enemy, were trying to help solve the problem. And then it's also very very important eventually to make them understand that, you know, this pollution problem, we cannot allow this carry on forever and it will have huge impact on the
public health and social economic development and ecosystem. If we really want to solve the problem, we must stop this so called breezing down to the bottom. You know, everyone's kind of those who cut corners on the environmental pollution got benefited in the market. So what we are doing is actually helped them to level the playing field. So gradually, not just the companies but also the local government realized that okay, maybe in this way people can give us
more trust. You know, so I still remember after you know, this Mark motivated the people to make their voice heard, and the government responded with a clean air action plan.
We managed to get the government to require for the major, the largest emitters to give their auto monitoring data to the public every hour they reported that to the public, and we build a blue map app and help people not just to access this data from thirty different platforms, put them together, but also color code them, you know, try to help people visualize, you know, who are not incompliance.
And after we launched that, a few months later, we got an invitation to meet with the head of the environmental agency of the largest province with the largest emission.
And that would have been a fun conversation.
Yeah, I got a bit nervous, you know, be course, I kind of thought that maybe another round of pressure would gon. But the director started by saying that, look, you know, we have one hundred million people in our province burning four hundred million tons of coal. By the way, that's half of the total core consumption of the United States. Ptgether, and which province is this? It's Shandom And now he said, I was required to bring down the PM two point five,
the fine particles that have the severe health impact. And he said, I believe that we would not be able to achieve this without the public understanding and support.
And what year was this?
That was twenty and fourteen, So eight.
Years after you started, you essentially had a high level government employee turn around and praise you for your work, and not just that saying your work is critical for us to be able to do our jos.
To be fair, you know, the ministry of the central government always being more sympathetic because they are a bit more detached from the very sharp local conflict of this business and their business interest. But on the local level, you're right, that was one of the first very positive engagement from the local government.
After the break. Marjune talks about how companies that you probably buy things from can use his data to clean up their supply chains. By the way, the East coast of the US recently experienced severe air pollution from Canadian wildfires. It dominated the news, but that kind of toxic care is a problem in many parts of the world. In a special bonus episode that you can find in your feed, zero has an explainer on what air pollution does to
your body. The work you've done has also made a business case for itself because the data that you're our organization publishers around pollution metrics is now being used by Western corporations. Give us a few examples.
Yeah, at the beginning, we're thinking about making an impact, and so First, we have the multinationals approaching as they themselves or their joint ventures were on our polluters map and pollution map, and so they try to solve their own problem. But I think, you know, we need to extend from that because most of them actually did not have much of their own production, but they purchase, they source it in a massive way in China. So it's
the supply chain which a bigger problem. And so two thousand and seven we launched a Green Choice initiative trying to engage with them on this issue. And at the beginning they all say that, sorry, in China, we don't know who are polluting and who are not. I said, I happen to have some data, a map that can help you identify some So.
No longer can Apple or Nike say we don't know what's happening in China. You can show if you have a supply chain in China, you can show what the pollution is tied to your supply.
Yeah. They can start by comparing their list with our list.
So some of them started to do that in a more proactive way, but some others have to wait for our you know, I tap into my investigation negative skills I learned through the media and link the severe pollution problem with some of the largest brands in the world and with their sourcing practice, and we're happy to see one by one, you know, increasingly they started changing their behavior and tapping into the data that we aggregated, you know,
all these records performance compliance records. So it has basically reached some hundreds of thousands of suppliers and so far, among them, more than twenty thousand have come to us and openly either address their violation records or try to use the digital platform to measure and disclose their carbon footprint.
Now we've talked about water pollution, soil pollution, and air pollution, which is mostly particulate matter pollution. What about carbon emissions? Has your work had an impact on reducing renals gas emissions.
In some way? Yeah, indirectly. When we try to control the local air pollution, one of the ways is to try to stop this vast expansion of coal consumption. You know, before China took the Clean Air Action Plan initiated that in just eleven years of time, our co consumption got tripled along with a massive increase this is eleven Yeah, that's right. But then ever Since that, you know, the thousands upound thousands of coal mines have been shut down and China issued policy to try to control the use
of coal. And with that, you know, the whole coal consumption got stabilized.
Right, it's blattered, It hasn't fallen, and it's blattered.
It plattered, that's right, but it's not enough. You know, it's still half of the total global burning or coal. You know, it's still half of the total, so still too much. And then China work together with the other partners, particularly with the US, to pave the way for Paris Agreement. After that we are approached by the multinationals or use our data. They said, from now, you know, we need to tackle the also the climate issue along our supply chains.
We hope you come up with something more integrated. And in response to that, we developed the supply chain Carbon Climate Action Index and use that to assess the performance of hundreds of major brands. And then after China made the commitment on carbon PEIC and neutrality.
Yes, in twenty twenty, China set the target for COVE neutrality by twenty sixty.
By twenty sixty, that's right. And after that, you know, we based on our previous work launched the Blue Map for Zero Carbon because we trust that we need to learn from the experience in dealing with local pollution. If we want to tackle our carbon problem, we also need transparency to raise public awareness, to basically enhance the enforcement and also empower public participation.
And in this process, have you seen any shift in how the government treats you and your work?
Yeah, there has been a major shift. In those earlier years. You know, we felt a lot of pushback and a lot of pressure. But then over the past ten years things have changed quite dramatically.
So the government now sees what you're doing is supportive not just for us supportive water, soil or air pollution, but also for its own cove neutrality targets.
Right, and this data driven method and all this digital way of doing things can help to make it more efficient and cut down the cost of for example, you know, managing carbon and management.
But is there a flip side to it, which is now that there is a carbon neutrality target, has the focus shifted to carbon pollution so much that water and soilt pollution don't get the same importance.
So far, you know, there are policy made to try to synergize all of this to create integrated solutions to address these issues together.
So I think so the tradeoff hasn't happened yet.
The tradeoff hasn't happened yet, but a bigger actually, a bigger risk, a bigger challenge, is that now the three long years of COVID impact, along with the all this turbulent global energy supply and market situation, and also the geopolitical tension, all of this work together to shift the global focus from environmental and climate work to some other issues.
More domestic energy security issues, economic develop major economies all try to ramp up to a certain extent and the fossil fuel capacity to try to insure energy security.
So in China, you know, with the easing of the COVID policy, COVID restriction, the economic recovery have been prioritized so earlier in the first quarter of this year, we already experienced some rebound in our edition. So I think now it's very very important that we don't relax our environmental work, and we need to find more creative ways to basically balance better balance development and protection and try to build back in a greener way.
In your experience doing this work for nearly two decades. Have you seen a shift in public opinion on environment and climate issues? And how have you seen that shift in a tangible way?
Yeah? Absolutely. When we got started, even if you stop someone in the passes by in the street, you know, not just factory owners or local officials, even the passes in the street, most of them would say that, you know, China was poor. We need to develop first before we eat even think about environment. But things have changed so much now, so many more people started paying attention to
this issue. You know, our blue map app the course of that millions of users and we have a program called take a Picture to create a blue calendar, and we have many followers, and they uploaded more than one point five million photos, each one of them with a watermark of the air quality when they took the picture, right. Yeah, it just shows how people really care about this issue.
What's the biggest thing people get wrong in trying to understand China's approach to tackling climate change.
I think some of the misperception is that China has not been trying to do it in a serious way. That's not right, because China, despite the very fact that we're still going through this development stage, there's no way to that naturally, you know, neutralize all these more than ten billion tons of carbon dioxide. We still made that commitment and started taking action on that. So I think that part most of the people are supportive to this work, but I do hope that this can be recognized also
by people from other parts of the world. And we need to do our own duty. You know, absolutely, we're the largest current greenhouse gacimitter in the world. We understand our duty. But in the meantime, you know, we are the factory of the world, not just manufacturing for ourselves, but all our exports have a lot of embedded carbon. So I think it will be so much better if
we can work together on that. And I do hope that people from this part of the world, particularly from America, can understand that there are opportunities for them to join our efforts because every day, the day in, day out, a lot of their consumption have they products mad, Yeah, there's a lot of mading China products, or at least that some of the most carbon intensive components of the
products are made in China. So if they care, they can tap into our data to riad questions to those brands sourcing from China and challenge them to pay attention to this issue because we have the ways to track down the supplier. If they care, then they can make greener choices. Of course, they need the consumers to recognize that.
Ma June, thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you.
What happens in China matters to the world, but how exactly change happens there isn't always clear, so it's valuable to get an insight from someone who has made an effort to work within the system and has some successes to show for it. Thanks to Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy for space to record this conversation in
New York City. The Center celebrated ten years this April, and at its celebratory day long event, I moderated a panel discussion with mar June and other experts from Morocco and India to talk about energy and climate needs in emerging economies. You can check out that panel in the show notes. Thanks for listening to Zero. If you like the show, please rate and review, share it with a friend or someone who recently bought something made in China.
Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine driscoll Art. The music is composed by wonderly special thanks this week to Kirubin Rim and Dan Muta. I'm Akshatrati back next week