Environmental cooperation urged

The Yangtze River Delta area's governments are seeking more regional cooperation on environmental protection before the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, an environmental official said.

Environmental protection bureaus from Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, and Shanghai municipality, will develop mechanisms to share air pollution data by the year's end as a first step toward developing regional air pollution treatment standards, Shanghai Environmental Protection Bureau director Zhang Quan told China Daily.

"It's necessary to set up a cooperation mechanism (in the delta) for combating air pollution not only because most localities in the region largely emit the same kinds of air pollutants but also because pollution from every city is likely to diffuse, traveling to neighboring cities," Zhang said yesterday on the sidelines of the second session of the 11th National People's Congress.