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Make growth greener

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-05 07:55

The situation report on environmental protection can hardly inspire much optimism even with the long-anticipated fall in two key measures of pollution last year.

The total amount of sulphur dioxide discharged in 2007 was 24.681 million tons, a decrease of 4.66 percent compared with that the year before. And the chemical oxygen demand discharge was 13.833 million tons, decreasing by 3.14 percent, according to a report from the national environmental watchdog.

The fall, for the first time in several years, points to some encouraging signs for the entire environmental situation to start turning for the better.

The percentage of thermal power generators installed with equipment to de-sulphurize coal had increased from 12 in 2005 to 48 last year. The total amount of waste water treated in cities rose from 52 percent to 60 percent during the same period.

The message is that the efforts that the central government has made to realize the goal of reducing energy consumption for one unit of GDP by 20 percent and major pollutant discharge by 10 percent from 2006 to 2010 have started to pay off.

The elevation of the national watchdog to a ministry under the State Council early this year was a sign that the central government has attached more importance to making economic growth more environment-friendly.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection has rejected or suspended the approval of 377 industrial projects out of environmental concerns in the past year. It has inspected more than 9,000 new industrial projects in the same period and penalized more than 1,000 of them for their violations of environmental rules. Ten firms had their applications for being listed in the stock market rejected because of their environmental problems.

The watchdog's cooperation with other government departments or institutions to prevent polluting enterprises from getting loans or getting listed has yielded some results.

Yet, pollution in major waterways such as the Yangtze, Yellow and Huaihe rivers is still serious and shows no sign of major improvement. So is the case with the pollution in the country's major lakes. What is even more worrisome is the finding in the report about the deteriorating biology and environmental pollution in rural areas.

This should push policymakers and the environmental watchdog to pay particular attention to the tendency to transfer polluting firms from cities to rural areas or from developed regions to underdeveloped ones. If the trend cannot be checked, the country will have to face the burden of dealing with rural pollution even before it has checked pollution in urban areas.

(China Daily 06/05/2008 page8)