3 regions rebuked for green offenses
Print Edition
CHINA’S Ministry of Ecology and Environment yesterday held talks with Party officials or government leaders from three regions for not doing enough to solve their environmental problems.
The ministry named and shamed Shizhu County in Chongqing, Yulin City in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Yichun in Jiangxi Province for seriously violating environmental regulations.
“Local authorities should learn lessons from this meeting ... you should dare to do a real job and actually grasp the problems you have failed to improve for years,” said He Xianghong, deputy head of an environment ministry monitoring team.
In Shizhu, an industrial park plan introduced in 2009 misappropriated over 336 hectares of a wetland nature reserve, seriously damaging land vegetation and the eco-system.
Instead of trying to solve the problems, county officials have been seeking to narrow the scale of the nature reserve by nearly 90 percent, the ministry said. “Officials have passively responded to correction requirements,” the ministry said.
Yulin had failed to rectify problems including the treatment of animal waste and water pollution, the ministry said.
Air quality has also been deteriorating since 2016, and the city was found to have tried to tamper with equipment at a local smog monitoring station.
Yulin was “taking a negative attitude toward central government inspections and rectification plans,” said Liu Changgen, vice director of the ministry’s supervision office.
Wei Tao, mayor of Yulin, said his government had wrongly been reluctant to punish officials who failed to follow environmental rules, saying the priority had been to attract firms to invest in the city.
Yichun failed to address dust pollution as required.
In April, the environment ministry held the first of its name-and-shame meetings, summoning mayors from three northern cities to account for their failings during last winter’s crackdown on smog.
The country’s smoggiest province of Hebei, which surrounds Beijing, said last month that it had fired and reprimanded more than a dozen officials for failing to control air pollution last year.
In recent years, the ministry has constantly arranged talks with local officials, urging them to take environment issues seriously as tackling pollution is one of the “three tough battles” China aims to win in next three years.
China introduced a new environment protection tax on January 1, to protect the environment and cut pollutants.
Companies and public institutions that discharge listed pollutants into the environment will be taxed for producing noise, air and water pollutants, and solid waste.
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