Cross-regional efforts key to cleaner air

China should speed up establishing unified standards for monitoring and curbing air pollution, so that different regions can coordinate their antipollution efforts, experts say.

Bao Jingling, a deputy to the National People's Congress and former chief engineer of the Tianjin Municipal Bureau of Environmental Protection, said that to curb pollution in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, China should bring neighboring Shanxi, Shandong and Henan provinces under unified standards for both planning and control.

Bao said that because of geological and meteorological conditions, airborne pollutants can travel from Shanxi, Shandong and Henan to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. One day in December, as a result of pollutants traveling from the southwest, Tianjin's air quality deteriorated from "good" to "severely polluted"within three hours.