On April 16, it’s learned that the Provincial Pollution Prevention Command Office recently issued a document announcing its assessment results of the pollution prevention campaign in 2018, in which Yichang was rated excellent and ranked first.
In the past year, the city adopted the policy of treating both principal and secondary aspects of pollution comprehensively to speed up the restoration and protection of the ecological environment, and to prevent pollution with unprecedented determination and strength, and has remarkably improved the ecological environment of the city.
In 2018, the average concentration of PM10 and PM2.5 in the national assessment areas within the city were 77μg/m3and 53μg/m3, with a year-on-year decrease of 12.5% and 8.6% respectively. The number of days with good air quality increased by 16 days, a rise by 5.4 percentage points, which was the best result in the past 5 years. Thus, all the annual objectives of the provincial assessment have been successfully accomplished in terms of the three indicators.
The water quality of the city’s main rivers has been steadily improving. And that of the 9 sections included in the national and Hubei Ten Actions on Water Pollution Protection in surface water assessment has reached the rate of excellence by 100%, and the total phosphorus concentration in the 3 sections of the main stream of the Yangtze River within the city has decreased by 10%, 12% and 26.7% respectively. The water quality compliance rate of the centralized drinking water source at or above the county level is 100%; the water quality of the 15 rivers included in the municipal River Chief System has been significantly improved.
In 2019, the city will firmly implement the spirit of the important speech made by General Secretary Xi Jinping during his inspection of Hubei and the Yangtze River, and push forward the ecological control and restoration of the Yichang section of the river with overwhelming force. Meanwhile, the city will spare no efforts to fight against pollution and take the lead in the province in both the protection and the restoration of the ecological environment of the river and in the promotion of its own high-quality development. (Reporter: Yang Jing; Correspondent: He Kun)