Japan has launched a training program with Chinese partners aimed at controlling sulfur discharges and acid rain that some experts believe are responsible for environmental degradation in Japan.
The program's launch was announced Tuesday in the official China Daily. It will train 750 environmental officers and technicians in pollution control and environmental monitoring.
While China has made vast improvements in controlling air pollution in recent years, monitoring is a crippling weakness, said H. Anwar, managing director of environmental consultancy Sinosphere. Yen loans from Japan helped to control emissions in China's northeast, starting in the early 1990s, but there is still "a long way to go," Anwar said.
Benxi in Liaoning Province was previously known as "Coal City," and was renowned for being the most smog-choked industrial city in China. Grants and technical assistance arranged by Japan's Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (now the Japanese Bank for International Cooperation) helped to implement emission control measures and markedly improved the situation.