Verbruggen: Enormous progress in environment

The Coordination Commission has held a lot of meetings in Beijing, and the environment is one of the topics of concern. Mr. Verbruggen said enormous progress has been made in this area in the past years.

Stressing Beijing's promises in its bid file to improve the environment and the air quality, he said: "BOCOG and the Chinese authorities, and the city of Beijing, obviously, have lived up to their commitments."

"But I think that some 5, 6, 7 years ago nobody could have foreseen this incredible and tremendous economic growth of your country, double digit percentages, let's put it like that. That is perhaps something that perhaps has had some negative effects as far as the environment is concerned.

"So I must say BOCOG has done what they have promised to do, China has done what was promised, they did, but we need more. Because of the enormous amount of construction work, and because of the enormous amount of cars that are added every day to the traffic in all your cities, and certainly also Beijing, we need to do more because we need to give absolute good air quality to the athletes when they come to Beijing already for the test events.

"BOCOG is now together with the authorities and the city especially studying all kinds of contingency measures and I can only confirm that we will need that."