Tough pollution controls will be imposed in south China's Guangdong Province in a raft of measures aimed
at making industry clean up its act.
The tougher measures include introducing strict upper limits of
pollution emissions for each of the province's 21 cities.
New industrial projects will also have a higher environmental
threshold to abide by, and it will be tougher for existing
industries that are known polluters to have their licenses
renewed.
Mountainous and rural areas will also be off limits to
industries wanting to relocate from the Pearl River Delta
region.
In another significant boost for the environment, the provincial
authorities will "accelerate" the desulphurization work for power
plants, and improve the online system that monitors key
polluters.
"For the purpose, the province will apply the mechanism to
evaluate the administration performance of the cities' leaders from
how well they have done in the environmental protection," Li Qing,
director-general of Guangdong Provincial Environmental Protection
Administration, said.
He said that the province's strategy was to minimize new
polluting projects while lowering the emission of sulfur dioxide
and sewage drainage.
"Any new project will not be permitted to go ahead as long as
its pollution standard does not come up to the environmental
threshold the province has set for different cities," he said.
"And those cities whose total pollution volume is likely to go
beyond the upper limit will not be allowed to approve any new
project."
And the province will install power-generating units of 20,000
megawatts with desulphurization facilities by the end of this
year.
Sewage disposal capacity will also be increased by another 1
million tons this year.
Hu Zhijun, director of Environment Comprehensive Administration
of Guangzhou Development District, said the provincial
environmental watchdog's tougher measures would not impose undue
pressure for the district to secure investment or earn the expected
GDP target.
"As a matter of fact, our district has gone a step ahead of the
province in prioritizing environmental issues," he said.
"Our environmental threshold is higher and our investment for
both desulphurization and sewage disposal has been more generous
than any other district in Guangzhou and even than many cities in
the province."
Projects that have not been allowed into the district in the
past couple of years include those whose energy consumption or
pollutant emission per unit GDP is higher than industry limits, Hu
added.
But Liang Hongwei, an official with Shanwei Foreign Trade and
Economic Co-operation Bureau, said more iron-fisted environmental
measures would burden his city and prevent it from luring investors
and "realizing a good GDP score".
"If we weren't so concerned about the environmental issue, it
would be much easier for us to benefit from the industrial transfer
from the better developed Pearl River Delta Region and hence a
higher GDP growth rate," Liang said.
However, he added, the efforts to nip pollution in the bud will
in the long term be better for the city's sustained economic
development.
"It will be too late and more expensive to deal with pollution
when the air is not fresh any longer and water no longer clear,"
the official said.
According to Liu Xiuli, an associate professor of public
administration with South China Normal University, making
government officials accountable for the environment, by way of
promotions and demerits was an effective scheme.
"They will be wise enough to balance between mere GDP and green
GDP," she said
"And tougher measures for environmental protection will in the
meantime boost the industrial shift to new and high-tech ones."
Liu suggested that the government should consider mapping out
some preferential policies to help the polluting enterprises
replace outdated production facilities with clean production
technologies.
Guangdong has topped other provinces in both sewage disposing
capacity and desulphurization capacity for several years.
Last year's emission of sulphur dioxide dropped 2.1 percent from
2005 in the province with the chemical oxygen demand (COD), which
is an important parameter of water pollution, falling 0.9 percent
from 2005. The province's GDP topped 2,500 billion yuan (US$321
billion) in 2006, a rise of 14.1 percent from 2005.
The achievements are in sharp contrast to the nation's
performance which failed to reach its goal set early last year to
save energy and reduce pollution discharge.
Official statistics indicate that Guangdong poured capital
inputs of more than 60 billion yuan (US$7.69 billion) in 2006 for
environmental protection, accounting for more than 2.5 percent of
the province's GDP last year.
(China Daily March 28, 2007)