Beijing tackles its heavy air pollution

As one of the most heavily polluted areas in the world, Beijing has finally decided to better monitor its levels of air pollution.

The Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Centre has asserted that an additional 15 monitoring stations will be put in place in the city in order to tackle the problem more directly.

As one of most heavily populated cities in the world, Beijing suffers huge amounts of pollution from a series of factors.

Most notably, the roots of the heavy air pollution are vehicles and power plants.

The effects of this pollution on individuals can be severe - ranging from asthma to heart and lung disease.

Because of the brutal consequences of air pollution, citizens have long been campaigning for a change. It is thought that this is the reason that Beijing has finally decided to tackle the problem.

Back in January, China's government announced that it would begin releasing previously unavailable daily readings of fine particulate pollution on the internet. This would inform citizens of the levels of pollution that day.

However, the US embassy also began posting results, but the readings were very different.

Questions were then raised over the truth of China's official pollution statistics.

"Though blocked by the Chinese censors' 'great firewall,' the tweets are quickly translated and spread around the Chinese internet, particularly when - as in recent weeks - the smog gets so thick that it swallows skyscrapers," The Guardian reported.

As these new, shocking results were tweeted, people became more and more outraged and took to social networking site Twitter to vent their fears and frustration.

It is thought that this attack forced the government of China to respond and use new methods to measure the levels of air pollution.

"The monitors will run for a three-month trial, and then the city's environmental protection department will formally use PM2.5 (small pollution particles) to evaluate the city's air quality, rather than relying on the larger particles it currently measures," The Guardian reports.

Hopefully this will allow Beijing to fully comprehend its levels of air pollution.