Groundwater pollution arouses concern
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E-mail CRI Online, March 8, 2013
According to Ma, China has the technical capacity and money to solve the problem but it lacks the most important thing, the impetus. The reasons range from law enforcement difficulties to a lack of social supervision.
To Ma, the disclosure of environmental information, especially pollution sources, is the key to solve the problem.
Together with many other environmentalists, Ma is pushing the government to disclose monitoring data online.
"Just think when we open the environmental information to the public, especially the information about pollution sources, we will put these polluting enterprises under the sun. Under such pressure, the local governments will have to strengthen their law enforcement. And it'll be easier to obtain evidence in environmental lawsuits as well. In this way we can improve the social supervision."
The recently issued pollutants monitoring regulation stipulates polluters must publish their monitoring data to the public.
Zhang Quan is the director of Shanghai Environmental Protection Bureau. He is also a deputy to the 12th National People's Congress.
"The information about pollutants will be more open of course. However, it needs some time. When doing so, I think, we should make sure the data is accurate, trustworthy and scientific. Wrong information may arouse panic. I think information disclosure is the key principle and covert information is only an exception."
However, information disclosure is not the final goal for environmentalists like Ma.
"We cannot stop there. I want to know the density of PM 2.5 to see whether I need a mask, but I can't do that forever. I need to know who is responsible for that and then curb it."
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