Big Data Used By Beijing Government To Alleviate Pollution

Pollution is getting worse in China's capital city, and the Beijing government is using technology to help fix some of the problems.

The Beijing municipal government has reached a deal with IBM to use the tech company's advanced weather forecast and cloud computing technologies to solve the stubborn smog problem in the city.

Facing serious environmental pollution problems, the Chinese government has promised citizens that it will take measures to improve the environmental situation. To handle the haze and pollution problems, it is necessary to enhance data collection and monitoring and forecast abilities. Beijing has reportedly established an early warning system with data from 35 monitoring stations and the system can warn about heavily polluted weather three days in advance and adjust traffic volume accordingly.

Under the agreement signed by the two parties, the Beijing municipal government will become an partner of IBM's ten-year Green Horizon project, targeting the Chinese market. This project aims to use IBM's forecast and data collection abilities to predict the occurrence of smog.

Meanwhile, because of China's promise to reduce the proportion of coal power generation, IBM's cloud computing analysis system will make optimizations and adjustments targeting renewable energy sources. State Grid's wind and solar energy demonstration project in Zhangbei, Hebei, shows that IBM's supply and demand management system will be able to reduce energy waste rates from 30% to 20%.

In addition, IBM said that the Green Horizon project will bring new business opportunities to China's pollution control and renewable energy source sectors. Financial terms of the cooperation were not immediately available.