Call for banks to fund pollution fight
Print Edition
CHINA will encourage banks to play a bigger role in providing the financing required to tackle mounting environmental problems in rural regions, a government official said yesterday.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection has said that the countryside has been a “weak link” in the nation’s war on pollution, which has mainly focused on cutting hazardous smog in industrialized regions such as north China’s Hebei Province.
China has been looking for new ways to fund efforts to remediate contaminated land, cut fertilizer use and tackle the vast amounts of untreated household waste that are threatening rural soil and water supplies, but governments are continuing to foot most of the bill.
To help meet the vast funding gap, new guidelines have been drawn up to encourage banks to provide more support for rural environmental treatment enterprises and encourage the use of public-private partnerships, the official said in comments published in China Environmental News, the ministry’s official publication.
The official said that China aims to treat or utilize 60 percent of livestock waste by the end of 2020.
It would also aim to “effectively treat” more than 90 percent of rural household waste by the end of the decade.
But central and local governments have continued to bear the cost for crucial water treatment and transmission infrastructure, and China is still struggling to implement an effective “polluter pays” system for handling waste, the official added.
In the current round of environmental treatment work in the countryside, only 10 percent of China’s 600,000 villages had performed the appropriate renovations, and many of those were now struggling to pay for work that had been done, he said. “The funding of rural environmental treatment is inadequate at every level,” he was quoted as saying.
As well as encouraging the involvement of financial institutions, China will use favorable power prices and other preferential policies to encourage the construction of biomass and biogas power plants in rural areas, he added.
China’s five-year plan, which was published in March, said the country would give priority to cleaning up contaminated soil used in agriculture.
It also promised to strengthen soil pollution monitoring systems and promote new clean-up technologies.
But treating agricultural land could end up costing China trillions of yuan, and policy-makers are still trying to establish mechanisms that will allow private firms to profit from the clean-up.
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