By Staff Reporter

Copyright macaonews

China has rolled out the world’s largest high-tech ecological and environmental monitoring system, deploying more than 33,000 stations nationwide to track everything from air and water quality to noise, soil and marine ecosystems, China Daily reports.

Announcing the initiative in Beijing last Friday, Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu said the network covered all prefecture-level cities, key river basins and sea areas, with advanced technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing now fully integrated.

“As China advances its pollution control efforts and the ‘Beautiful China’ initiative, demand has grown for more accurate, comprehensive, and timely monitoring data,” he stated.

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The system represents a shift from manual to automated and digital monitoring methods. Full-process automation has already been achieved with regards to sampling, delivery and analysis, with drones now able to collect water samples 70 percent faster than before.

Some laboratories can run continuous tests without human involvement even in complete darkness, boosting efficiency more than eightfold compared to traditional approaches.

Authorities are also upgrading air and water monitoring stations to “smart” systems needing maintenance once a week instead of once a month. Pilot programmes are already underway in 143 air monitoring stations in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

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AI was playing a growing role in environmental monitoring, Huang said. The ministry has built ecological spectrum databases and sound signature libraries that allow AI tools to identify pollution sources more precisely. Noise pollution, for example, can now be traced directly to construction, transport or social activities, enabling more targeted action.

According to vice-minister Yu Huiwen, such innovations have transformed the workloads of environmental law enforcement officers. AI-powered models can flag 48 types of air pollution problems across seven major scenarios, which have helped inspectors uncover 260,000 violations so far during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25).

“The accuracy rate of those identified clues has increased from 40 percent at the very beginning to over 85 percent now,” he said.