The Beijing area has been hit by eight sandstorms this spring (since March), and according to a story today, it’s due to several factors:

• Desertification by overgrazing (330+ million goat and sheep)
• Lower water tables due to drought and poor water management
• Tree planting slowing but not stopping desertification

As for some hard numbers, from Worldwatch.org:

According to China’s State Environmental Protection Agency, the timing of the first sandstorm moved up by a week in 2006, and the sandstorm-affected area has extended beyond 3 million square kilometers…

The poor weather conditions have cast a cloud over Beijing’s Blue Sky project, thwarting municipal efforts to improve air quality. In the period from April 1–18, the city reported only five blue-sky days.

A May 12 story had some interesting stats:

The monitoring task is enormous, with about 9,000 construction sites in the city. Samples have been taken at 280 sites in recent weeks, and 59 were found to have excessive levels of dust, Li said…

To combat the problem, 7,100 old diesel buses and 35,000 ageing taxis were taken off the city’s roads from 2000 to 2005. About 2,700 buses, which run on natural gas, were also introduced.

This year, Beijing Municipal Committee of Communication plans to take a further 8,000 taxis and 2,000 buses out of service.

The first time I experienced a sandstorm in Beijing, I thought it was just “pollution as usual” until a friend told me the cinnamon coating was not normal. People’s Daily also has something about how countries are working together on this problem.