Germany keen to help China in battle against pollution

Germany wants to share its experience in sustainable development with China amid the country's new round of economic reform and upgrading, German Ambassador to China Michael Clauss said at a meeting of Environment Innovation – Sino-German Solutions on Tuesday.

Clauss believes maintaining economic growth while developing environmental protection is a better choice for China and Germany, given that the two are unlikely to solve the problem of pollution by deindustrialization.

At the meeting, co-organized by the German Embassy in Beijing, Mercator Institute for China Studies and China Association of Environment Protection Industry, about 150 Chinese and German business representatives, government officials and academic researchers discussed possible cooperation and challenges in environment protection.

The ambassador emphasized that urbanization, together with environment protection, is a huge field for bilateral cooperation. Germany with many advanced technologies in the environment protection industry and similar experience of tacking environmental pollution can contribute a lot to China in its process of sustainable development.

To attract German environmental firms Clauss said China needs to make more efforts on intellectual property protection.

From the 1960s to 1970s Germany faced serious environmental problems similar to those in China now. In the industrial Ruhr region the sky used to be covered by fog and people could not swim in the rivers.

Germany decided to clean up the air and the rivers and did this a second time after German reunification in 1990, cleaning up the then Eastern Germany within a couple of years.