China braced for rise in air pollution deaths

Country needs to speed up environmental response to protect its ageing population, multinational study finds

In 2005 Beijing was crowned the smog capital of the world. Concerns about air pollution and athlete health overshadowed preparations for the 2008 Olympic Games and required industry and traffic shutdowns to clean the air during the event itself.

Now, a team of researchers at Chinese, German and Canadian universities have tracked the impacts of deteriorating air at that time. They found that particle pollution deaths in China were increasing at about 213,000 a year and peaked at 2.6mn people in 2005.