While China's GDP has risen at an annual rate of 8 to 12 per cent since the nation embarked on opening and reform in the late 1970s, environmental damage has eaten away between 8 to 13 per cent of that GDP growth every year.

This is because virtually all of the country's key industries  mining, textiles, paper, iron and steel, chemicals, petrochemicals and building materials  consume large amounts of energy and create a great deal of pollution.

Therefore, the Chinese economy remains dominated by resource-hungry and inefficient polluters.

As a result, one-quarter of the Chinese people drink substandard water, while one-third of country's urbanites breathe seriously polluted air. Moreover, the country has recently witnessed a spate of environmental accidents. China currently suffers from one water pollution accident every other day. The resulting damage to public health is a major cause for concern.

So far, China has signed up to the Kyoto Protocol and an additional 50 international environmental accords. If we fail to take serious enough efforts to upgrade our industrial structure, we will be in a very awkward situation when it comes to fulfilling our commitments to cut emissions.

In addition, many provinces have failed to meet the major environment protection targets of the 10th Five-Year Plan (2001-05), although they have met and exceeded the plan's GDP targets in advance.

True, in just 30 years, China has made economic advances that took Western countries a century to accomplish. But it is equally true that the environmental problems suffered by Western countries over those 100 years have visited upon China within just three decades.

Developed nations generally tackled their environmental problems when their per capita annual GDP reached between US$8,000 and US$10,000. But we cannot wait that long to sort out our environmental woes.

It is predicted that the environmental crisis will intensify when China's per capita annual GDP reaches just US$3,000. Bearing this in mind, we must do our utmost to resolve these environmental problems as soon as possible.

China's environmental problems are the result of very complex causes. But in the final analysis, they can ultimately be attributed to our one-sided understanding of Marxism between the 1950s and 1970s.

At the time, we treated Marxism exclusively as a philosophy of class struggle, overlooking its other aspects. This was compounded by the misunderstanding that economic development could cure all of our ills.

Later, the pursuit of material gain seemed to become society's sole objective, resulting in a decline in moral standards. Traditional culture, which lays great stress on harmony between human beings and nature, was regarded as a straitjacket limiting economic growth.

To make matters worse, while we discarded these fine elements of traditional Chinese culture, we failed to absorb many of the better aspects of modern civilization. For instance, the concept of rights and obligations and that of the social contract, which stand for the most essential values in a modern society, those which constitute the most important preconditions for environmental protection today, go largely ignored by some Chinese.

As a result, the boundaries of rights and obligations in terms of environmental protection often become blurred. And environmental protection projects often fail to be included in the calculation of production costs. In addition, the environmental rights of disadvantaged groups are deprived.

Due to the failure to take the environment into account in our urban planning, China's big cities are expanding at rapid pace, using up precious water resources, and resulting in worsening traffic congestion and air pollution.

Meanwhile, environmental problems have been caused in many provinces due to their failure to take the fragile ecological system into account when planning the construction of power generation and chemical plants.

In view of all this, we should include environmental factors in our macro-economic planning. This, in turn, requires that a more rational strategy be mapped out in planning the distribution of major industrial projects and energy-hungry undertakings. This should follow a careful study of the available energy, land, mineral deposits and biological resources. Excessive and chaotic exploitation should be turned into proper and orderly use.

We should also overhaul the way in which land planning is conducted. This means that sector monopoly and administrative boundaries should be broken up and that regional and sectoral development targets be set according to the population in different areas, their potential and current economic growth, the volume of resources and the environment's capacity to absorb pollution.

We should also devise a new energy strategy as soon as possible. Industrialized nations have developed and made great use of new energy resources, such as nuclear, solar, wind and biogas.

In contrast, China's technological development in this regard not only trails that of developed countries but also lags behind that of fellow developing nations such as India and Pakistan. Using new energy is the only way we can pursue economic growth without doing irreparable damage to our environment. There is simply no alternative.

The public has the biggest stake in environmental protection and is, therefore, the biggest driving force behind environmental undertakings. Therefore, local communities, non-governmental organizations, business and environmental protection bodies all need to do their bit. Their involvement should not be limited to the traditional methods of legislation, supervision and making appeals to the authorities. Many other ways should be introduced, including public hearings, public welfare lawsuits, enhanced media coverage and voluntary activities.

Ecological and environmental legislation should be realigned and reintegrated to accentuate the environmental departments' position in terms of unified supervision and administration. This is made necessary due to overlapping legislation in this regard, weak implementation of the law and numerous legal loopholes.

A whole set of legal mechanisms involving ecological compensation needs to be introduced. The basic principle with regard to ecological compensation is: Those who protect the environment should benefit and those who pollute the environment should pay.

In addition to institutional hardware, we also need to improve the current environmental management system and establish a cross-sector co-ordination mechanism. For example, the environmental watchdogs scattered across different sectors should be unified. In addition, the bodies enforcing environmental laws should be centralized, while a research system covering studies of the "green" economy and environmental-protection policy should be introduced.

In addition, a system should be established to monitor officials' performance in this regard, and an environmental responsibility mechanism should also be put in place.

We have our hands full with all of these tasks. But what is most important is that we set about doing something right now.

The author Pan Yue is vice-minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration.