Air quality was below national standards in almost all China's major cities last year, a top environment official said today, after Premier Li Keqiang pledged to "declare war" on pollution.
Only three out of the 74 cities monitored by the government met a new air quality standard, said Wu Xiaoqing, a vice minister of environment protection.
The standard lists limits on a string of pollutants including sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and airborne particles.
It caps the average 24-hour exposure to PM 2.5 -- small particles which easily penetrate the lungs and have been linked to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths -- at 75 micrograms per cubic metre for residential areas, three times the World Health Organisation's recommended safe limit.
Even so, the only major cities to meet the standard were the Tibetan capital Lhasa, Haikou on the southern island province of Hainan, and Zhoushan on the coast of Zhejiang, Wu said.
"The lingering smog again showed that our country's air pollution is extraordinarily severe," he told reporters on the sidelines of the annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's Communist Party-led parliament.
"Emissions of those pollutants were so huge they went beyond the level the environment can bear," he said.
China's heavy and chemical industries, its reliance on coal as its main energy source, rapidly growing car emissions and widespread urban construction were the main causes, he added.
