On june 12, I visited the SEMC, the Shanghai Environment Monitoring Centre, which is located at the number 1 of West Nandang Road.This centre is a medium size building of the late seventies and it comprises 15 floors of several offices and labs. I was received by the engineer in chief who kindly described me how the centre works.The SEMC has several main divisions, such as air quality division, water pollution division, biologic hazardous materials division and noise division. There are 50 monitoring stations in Shanghai, but only 8 of them, which are selected by the NEP (National Environment Protection), could transfer the API (Air Pollution Index) to the public.The responsibility of SEMC is to collect information from each specific monitoring station to their information division, and then that information would be processed by their database and information system to transfer to internet or intranet. In other words, their work is much like quality management controlled and monitored by the SEPB. The Shanghai Environment Protection Bureau. The “political” office to which the SEMC should report.
