Environmental Governance of Western Europe and Its Enlightenment to China: In Context to Rhine Basin and the Yangtze River Basin.

The pollution control of the Rhine is a successful management mode for comprehensive cooperation in environmental governance, which could provide an important reference for the Yangtze River governance. This study explored river basin management and various pollution problems faced by these two rivers at different times, and also includes governance and management effects. The changes in water quality and aquatic life before and after policy implementation had also been compared. The results showed that the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine (ICPR) made outstanding contributions to the water-quality improvement, demonstrating its management mode was efficient and effective. Cooperative communication and targeted policies are effective ways to improve the water quality of large river basins. Clear division of labor system and phased cooperation-governance objectives are also significant for the inter-provincial cooperative governance of Yangtze River pollution.

Decrease in the chronic health effects from PM2.5 during the 13th Five-Year Plan in China: Impacts of air pollution control policies.

The Chinese government implemented a series of policies to improve air quality during the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (13th FYP). However, the long-term health effects of the 13th FYP air pollution control policies have not been evaluated, and the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has brought great uncertainty regarding the evaluation of the effects. In this study, we selected 329 cities in mainland China to study the chronic health effects due to the decrease in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) during the 13th FYP. The relative risk (RR) of PM2.5 exposure was obtained from a previous study, and the total premature deaths were calculated. We also applied the grey prediction model to predict the PM2.5 concentration in each city in 2020 to evaluate the impacts of COVID-19. The results showed that the annual PM2.5 concentration was reduced from 49.7 µg/m3 in 2015 to 33.2 µg/m3 in 2020, and premature deaths were reduced from 1,186,201 (95% CI: 910,339-1,451,102) and 446,415 (in key regions, 95% CI: 343,426-544,813) in 2015 to 997,955 (95% CI: 762,167-1,226,652) and 368,786 (in key regions, 95% CI: 282,114-452,567) in 2020, respectively. A total of 188,246 (95% CI: 148,172-224,450) people avoided premature deaths due to the reduction in PM2.5 concentrations from 2015 to 2020. Although the impacts of COVID-19 in 2020 brought a significant reduction of 35.3% in February (14.2 µg/m3, p < 0.0001) and in March by 17.6% (5.8 µg/m3, p = 0.001), we found that COVID-19 showed few obvious influences on China's long-term air pollution control plans. The observed data and predicted data are very close in annual mean values and showed no statistical significance both in all cities (p = 0.98) and in key regions (p = 0.56) in 2020.