From 2015 to 2021, the impact of winter heating on China’s capital Beijing and 27 other cities saw concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) from heating activities reduce by 41.3 per cent. This compares favourably with a drop of 12.9 per cent in other northern Chinese cities which used lower levels of clean fuels than those in the Beijing region.
China’s centralised winter heating strategy is one of the world’s largest energy-consumption systems, providing free or heavily subsidised heating to urban residents. The system is usually switched on from mid-November to March each year.
Whilst coal has been the main heating energy source in northern China – accounting for 83 per cent of the total heating area in 2016 – new policies have encouraged the use of cleaner fuels such as gas and electricity, reducing the dependence of urban areas on coal and rural areas on biomass.
The study from researchers in University of Birmingham, UK, and Nankai University...