Beijing has officially set a structure-height limit of 500 meters for all its future skyscrapers….reports Asian Lite News
China has prohibited the construction of the tallest skyscrapers amid mounting concerns over the safety and quality of such projects.
Beijing has officially set a structure-height limit of 500 meters for all its future skyscrapers.
According to the country’s top planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), buildings taller than 500 meters will no longer be approved for construction, RT reported.
Also Read
Also, structures over 250 meters are to be limited, while buildings taller than 100 meters will be examined with regard to the fire-rescue capacity of their locations.
The NDRC issued the order late on Tuesday, citing concerns for construction safety as well as an oversupply of commercial offices as grounds for its decision.
The order comes two months after the as-yet unexplained wobbling of the 72-story SEG Plaza in China’s southern city of Shenzhen, which prompted a hasty evacuation and created chaos in the surrounding streets.
At 984 feet (300 meters), SEG Plaza is one of the tallest skyscrapers in Shenzhen, housing a large electronics market and numerous offices. A handful of videos posted to social media showed parts of the structure swaying back and forth
According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, China is home to 44 of the world’s 100 tallest buildings, including five of the 10 tallest 500-meter structures.
ALSO READ: CPEC: Gilgit-Baltistan Pays the price for China’s Greed
Meanwhile, during an inspection, Chinese environment ministry has revealed that one out of every two Chinese companies were found to have numerous air pollution issues.
A Chinese media outlet Caixin reported citing the Ministry of Ecology and Environment that one out of every two Chinese companies inspected by regulators were found to have numerous air pollution issues, with those in the building materials and chemical and pharmaceutical sectors among the biggest culprits.
“Of the 1,582 companies inspected in 30 cities in May, 882 were found to have a total of 1,940 issues related to air pollution of the environment,” the Ministry said in its statement earlier this week.
Due to the following air pollution, people may be caught with severe diseases.
Harvard University’s Jesse Turiel and Boston University’s Robert Kaufmann examined the measurement of PM2.5, particulate matter that’s linked to lung cancer, asthma and heart disease, recorded by Chinese and US stations between January 2015 and June 2017.
They discovered temporary divergences between the two data sets that were more likely to occur during periods of high air pollution, suggesting that “government-controlled stations systematically underreport pollution levels when local air quality is poor.”
China is the world’s largest carbon producer, closely followed by the US, according to Fox News.
“Local bureaucrats face immense pressure to report the ‘correct’ numbers to their higher-ups, and some resort to colluding with other local officials or misreporting data… Given these institutional incentives to cheat, official air pollution data in China often is treated with a high degree of skepticism, by both outside observers and the general public,” the researchers wrote.
“Our results strongly suggest that some local Chinese officials continued to misreport measurements of PM2.5 concentrations in many of the country’s largest megacities, even after the government’s post-2012 policy reforms. Consistent with our findings, in early 2018 the MEE announced that it had caught officials in seven cities manipulating data during the previous year,” the researchers said.
According to a report by research from Ember, a London-based energy and climate research group, China is now responsible for more than half (53 per cent) of the world’s coal-fired electricity, up from 44 per cent in 2015. (ANI)
ALSO READ: China must avoid overreacting to Modi’s birthday greetings to Dalai Lama
[soliloquy id="151345"]