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China’s clean heating policies may have prevented over 23,000 premature deaths in 2021, study finds

  • Concentrations of hazardous PM2.5 particles fell by 41 per cent in Beijing and 27 other cities from 2015 to 2021 due to the policies, researchers say
  • The government introduced a winter clean heating plan for the north of the country in 2017, aiming to reduce air pollution

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Air quality in Beijing and other northern Chinese cities improved from 2015 to 2021 because of a clean heating plan, according to a new study. Photo: Getty Images
Echo Xie

China’s clean heating policies have improved air quality in the north of the country and potentially prevented more than 23,000 premature deaths in 2021 compared to 2015, according to a new study.

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From 2015 to 2021, concentrations of PM2.5 – the fine and hazardous particles that are a key indicator of air pollution – dropped by 41 per cent in Beijing, Tianjin and 26 surrounding cities, known as the “2+26” cities, and by 13 per cent in other northern cities because of the policies, the study found.

“This demonstrates the effectiveness of stricter clean heating policies on PM2.5 in ‘2+26’ cities,” according to researchers from the University of Birmingham and Nankai University in Tianjin.

They said that as a result of the drop in PM2.5 concentrations, premature deaths caused by winter heating fell from 169,016 in 2015 to 145,460 in 2021. That suggested 23,556 premature deaths had been prevented in 2021 because of the clean heating policies.

The study findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology on Wednesday.

China has centralised winter heating systems that are usually switched on from mid-November and switched off again in mid-March. This “heating season” is one of the largest energy consumers in the world. The main energy source is coal, which provided more than 80 per cent of heating in China in 2016, according to a Greenpeace analysis of government data. Biomass burning is also often used in rural areas.

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