Progress on pollution but still much to do

A number of achievements have been made in addressing environmental protection issues during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15), and efforts to overcome the country's environmental challenges will continue to be made during the next five-year plan.

In 2012, China's Ministry of Environmental Protection revised the Ambient Air Quality Standard, and it officially came into effect in about 74 cities the following year. For the first time, the new ambient air quality standards include fine particulate matter PM2.5 into the items to be monitored and set the maximum concentration. They also set a limit for the concentration of ozone, and strengthen the limit on the annual average concentration of PM10. The newly added monitoring and disclosure of PM2.5, in particular, has prompted more Chinese to take local air pollution seriously in the last three years.

In 2013, just 74 cities that monitor air quality have disclosed their PM2.5 pollution - mostly provincial capitals and major cities in East China's Yangtze River Delta and Southeast China's Pearl River Delta, and North China's Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. But 367 cities have disclosed their PM2.5 pollution this year.