China's government may impose even more stringent measures to improve Beijing's air quality if it deteriorates during the Summer Olympics, reports say.

The English-language China Daily cited a senior engineer with the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau as saying that additional special measures could be announced soon.

"We will implement an emergency plan 48 hours in advance if the air quality deteriorates during the Aug 8-24 Games," China Daily quoted Li Xin as saying on Monday.

Some Chinese environmentalists have suggested that up to 90 per cent of Beijing's cars will have to come off the road.

The host city of the 2008 Games started an emergency anti-air-pollution campaign on July 20, temporarily closing factories and keeping about half the city's cars off the road on any given day.

That effort has been expanded to the co-host city of Tianjin and Hebei province. Hebei surrounds both Beijing and Tianjin.

But high temperatures, low winds and continuing high levels of emissions mean an ongoing problem with air quality -- although one Chinese official said some of the haze comes from high humidity.  He likened it to sitting in a steam bath.

Not everyone is buying that argument.

China promised to meet World Health Organization standards for the Games, but in recent days, pollution levels have been about double that benchmark.

"With the current performance of air quality in Beijing, the IOC, the Beijing Olympic Organization Committee, and also sports teams from various countries have reason to be concerned with the situation," Lo Sze Ping of Greenpeace China said Monday.

That environmental group released a report that actually praised many environmental aspects of the Beijing Games, including:

  • having 20 per cent of venue electricity coming from wind power
  • improving vehicle emissions standards to among the most stringent in the world
  • building up rail transportation in the city of more than 16 million
  • the largest fleet of compressed natural gas-powered buses anywhere in the world.

However, Greenpeace also identified "missed opportunities," such as using landfills and incineration to deal with garbage.

Beijing has acted to improve air quality in the long term, but the drastic short-term measures seen now show that it should have acted more aggressively in the past 12 months to ensure clean air for the Games, it said.

"Overall, Greenpeace believes that the environmental efforts of (the Beijing Olympic committee) and the Beijing municipal government have created a positive legacy for the city of Beijing," the report says.

Beijing has done more than Athens, host of the 2004 Games, but less than Sydney, the 2000 host, it said, adding Sydney remains the standard for "green" Games.

In the future, Greenpeace said Beijing should continue to:

  • tackle air pollution through the regulation of vehicle emissions
  • push industrial production towards cleaner technologies
  • move away from coal as a source of electricity.

China gets more than 70 per cent of its electric power from coal, which is a cheap source but the "dirtiest" in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.

China, a nation of 1.3 billion, has become the world's biggest total emitter of greenhouse gases. However, on a per capita basis, its emissions are about one-quarter of those in Canada and the United States.

With a report from CTV's Steve Chao