Environment

Green shoots of hope

By Li Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-01 08:25

Left: Beijing residents brave a gust of desert wind to plant trees in Fengning of Hebei province on April 14, 2001. Right: A view of the polluted Dasha river in Fanzhi County, North China's Shanxi province, on June 16, 2006. Left: Zhang Feng / for China Daily; Right: Xinhua

At every event held by Green Earth Volunteers, Wang Yongchen, 57, founder of the environmental organization, asks her participants to describe how the rivers have changed in their hometowns. The younger participants, often in their 20s or 30s, always come up with answers that the rivers are no longer the way they were. Most of them are either dark, smelly, or in some cases completely dried up. "That's why I care so much about the rivers in China. I'm always worried about where we will get water from if such trends continue," says Wang, a journalist-turned-environmentalist.

During the past 10 years, Wang has organized several programs, with active participation by volunteers and journalists, to visit the rivers in Southwest China and record their changes every year.

Her findings over the years have been startling. Rampant pollution, waters being dammed for power generation, loss of valuable fish resources and forced relocation of villagers are all the byproducts of economic gains from industrial projects or hydropower stations.

Such findings also pose a dilemma for policymakers, and also highlight the fact that China's economic prowess has not been without pain. The strong economic growth came with a heavy price: rapid resource depletion and environmental degradation.

A recent study on China's macro environmental strategies, jointly published by the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the Ministry of Environmental Protection, attributed the problems to poor understanding of the relationship between development and conservation.

"In the early 1970s, although several cases of public environmental disasters already caused severe damage to human health and resulted in huge economic losses, China did not take enough measures to prevent pollution," says the study.

Rather, it was believed that pollution is "an inherent defect of capitalism", which is unlikely to happen in socialist China, despite the fact that initial damage to the environment had been done in 1950s when backyard iron smelters were promoted all over the country, and natural ecology had been destroyed in 1960s when forests were torn down and wetlands reclaimed for agricultural purposes, the study finds.

It was not until a severe water pollution case in a Beijing reservoir in 1972 that the authorities decided to take pollution control seriously. In 1979, China published its first environmental protection law.

Since then, environmental protection has been given increasing weight in China's overall economic and social development. Over the following 30 years, the nation has made a green dream a buzzword for the future.

Zhang Kunmin, a retired senior environmental official, saw the changes through the increased sizes of official stamps used by China's environmental authority.

"The current Ministry of Environmental Protection started off as a bureau under the Ministry of Urban and Rural Construction and Environmental Protection in the 1980s. Since then it's been elevated several times," says Zhang.

In 1984, the bureau was renamed the National Environmental Protection Agency, but was still under the Ministry of Urban and Rural Construction and Environmental Protection. As part of a government downsizing campaign, the national environmental protection agency was elevated to the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) in 1998.

"Every time the administration was elevated, we had to upgrade to a larger stamp, suggesting that we're endowed with more power (to tackle and prevent pollution)," says Zhang, who worked for 10 years as a deputy director with the State Administration of Environmental Protection before retiring.

As the country's economic growth started to pick up pace in the mid-1990s, factories were built, energy consumption rocketed, pollution was widespread and the environment continued to deteriorate.

In 1995, China listed sustainable development as an important strategy for the first time, highlighting the significance of environmental protection, energy and resources saving, and emphasizing that economic growth should be in accordance with the environment capacity.

But environmental authorities always found themselves in an awkward situation. With GDP growth high on the government agenda, the power to block polluting projects was often limited.

In 2008, the environmental watchdog celebrated its big day in March when SEPA was elevated to a full-fledged ministry under the State Council, which experts say gives the ministry more say in the country's overall economic plans.

At the same time, the growing prominence given to the environmental watchdog reflects the mounting pressures and challenges in tackling pollution amid rapid industrialization and urbanization.

Known as the world's factory, China's rapid economic growth has often been characterized by energy and resource-intensive manufacturing industries, which are also responsible for massive environmental pollution.

Currently, 320 million rural people still do not have access to safe drinking water in China and, of these, 190 million people use drinking water that contains excessive levels of hazardous substances.

China launched a nationwide clean-up campaign in 2006 to reduce major water and air pollution. It was the first time that mandatory environmental goals were included in the country's social and economic programs.

The national 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010) set the target of reducing emissions of sulfur dioxide and chemical oxygen demand by 10 percent respectively from 2005 levels by 2010.

Since the targets were unveiled, appraisal of local officials was also tied to their achievement in reaching the green goals. Before that, only economic growth counted, which resulted in a GDP obsession and neglect of environmental damage. The country's top leaders hoped such a mechanism could curb local governments' growth craze.

Such efforts have paid off. By the end of 2010, emissions of sulfur dioxide and chemical oxygen demand have dropped 14 percent and 12 percent respectively between 2006 and 2010.

For the next five years, China will expand its pollution control program to include targets for two more pollutants.

"China now faces more pressure on pollution control than any other country in the world. Challenges facing the environment and natural resources are among the harshest," Zhou Shengxian, environmental protection minister, said recently.

"As a result, the task of solving these problems is also the toughest."

Unveiling the new Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), China's central government has put economic rebalancing high on its agenda. The annual target for economic growth was lowered to 7.5 percent from the double-digit growth recorded in the previous years.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Chinese Academy of Engineering have recently laid out a roadmap to tackle the pollution: to bring rampant pollution, rapid ecological degradation and the loss of valuable species under control within two decades.

"The target is to effectively curb emissions of major pollutants and ensure environmental safety by 2020," says the macro environmental strategies worked out by the two departments.

(China Daily 06/01/2011 page53)