BEIJING - China's top environmental watchdog will implement a three-year action plan from this year to clamp down on environmental offenses including fabrication and interference of monitoring data.China's Ministry of Ecology and Environment will step up supervision and checks on the data gathered by monitoring agencies at provincial, municipal and county levels, an official with the ministry said Thursday.Polluters in key regions such as the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area and Yangtze River Delta as well as sectors including papermaking will be scrutinized, according to the official.Despite progress in China's ecological and environmental monitoring in recent years, salient and urgent problems still exist such as repeated falsification of data by polluters and recurrent interference from local authorities, the official noted.Local officials found guilty of interfering with environmental monitoring will receive disciplinary punishment in accordance with relevant law and rules, and those confirmed of criminal offenses in tampering with or fabricating monitoring data will be prosecuted by judicial organs, the official added.Earlier this month, the ministry held talks with leading government officials from the city of Linfen in coal-rich Shanxi Province regarding lax environmental protection measures and worsening air quality.The ministry found the city had fabricated environmental monitoring data from April 2017 to March 2018 by interfering with its six monitoring stations nearly 100 times.Sixteen people involved in fabricating data were convicted and sentenced to varying jail terms in May 2018. custom bar braceletcustom sports braceletscustom logo wristbandsde securite pour personne ageeembossed wristbandscolorfilled wristbandsembossed printed wristbandsdual layer wristbands
BEIJING - Traffic congestion eased in Beijing in2017, partly due to the increase in shared bike use, figures show.A third-party evaluation found the number of medium or high congestion days, days with a traffic index above 6, reduced by 16 days in the capital last year compared with 2016. The average traffic flow speed rose by 10 percent, according to the city's transport commission.The traffic index ranges from 0 to 10, with the number increasing as congestion worsens. Medium congestion is a traffic index between 6 and 8, and the average index in Beijing was 5.6 in 2017.More subway lines, bus lanes, and the emergence of shared bikes are among the reasons for the improved traffic.The number of shared bikes has jumped to 2.2 million in Beijing, meaning one bike per 10 residents, the commission said in a statement.On average, 4 million passenger trips are made using Mobike shared bicycles each day in Beijing, a spokesperson from the company said recently. About 50 percent of those trips are to or from subway stations.More measures have been taken to encourage people to choose other transport options over vehicles, including the building and renovation of bicycle lanes and pedestrian walkways.Beijing currently has over 1,014 kilometers of paths specifically for bicycles and pedestrians. By 2020, that figure is expected to reach 3,200 kilometers.A special bike path will be built for commuters between Huilongguan and Shangdi in northern Beijing. The project will be finished by September this year.
