Prior to the games, I wrote the post Post-Olympics: Will China Continue to Green? where I asked threw out the question of whether or not China would continue to take steps forward in cleaning up its environmental issues.. or if it would slide backwards into old habits.
When thinking about this, I am forced to make some judgments as to the trajectory of recent data because there really is nothing historical to draw on when looking at where the merging of China’s develop civil society has met the downsides of development. It simply did not exist 2 years ago.
Where the first publicly visible change occurred, and I covered this in a speech earlier this year, was when Tiahu Lake in Wuxi experienced a significant algae bloom that captured the attention of nearly everyone in China. It was a point in time that we will look back in 15 years as a tipping point, or perhaps a turning point as citizens, NGOs, and SEPA were able to use this event to build their power base… citizens across the country wer forced to see the costs of development at a national level… and the central party – embarrassed by the incident – came down hard on local officials all over the country who were putting FDI before environment.
Going forward, where I think we are going to find hope is that the government has spent billions of dollars cleaning up the air in Beijing, a separate food chain for athletes was created, and millions of people who will remain to continue their lives will remember the blue sky days.
and they will expect the sky to remain blue.
What many in the media have missed is the fact that while things were not ideal, the environmentally were a quantum leap improvement from 5 years ago when the number of annual blue sky days could be counted on with fingers and toes.
Much like the internet, the ability of the government to control the inevitable is going to be very difficult. They have exposed their people to the possibilities and shown them that the government can change things when motivated.
Where this is an opportunity for firms, some of which we have covered, is that Beijing cannot do this on their own. they will need to learn from others like the US, UK, and Japan who have goen through their stage of rapid development and cleaned up.. and they wil need help in the way of technologies, training, and best pracice sharing from firms like GE, Eaton, and others who can bring in existing solutions as well.
CNBC put an article togeher called Smoggy Olympics Opens Door To Clean-Tech Bonanza just prior to the games that summarized this well, but like many I think they are still missing the greater context by which change will occur. there has been a strong central party determined to balance things out, but it is only recently that local officials had to fear their own citizens… and that is where the changes will occur. civil society.
In their recent report,