Policy Makers from West China Learn to Be Environment FriendlyPolicy makers from China's west finished Friday an "education class" on environmental protection with the close of a five-day international forum on policies enhancing sustainable development.The forum, jointly sponsored by China's National School of Administration and the World Bank Institute, was mainly designed to encourage local officials from the west to take the factor of the environment into consideration for sustainable development. China is carrying out an ambitious strategy to develop its backward and resources-rich west regions in a move to narrow down the gap between the east and west in economic and social development. At the forum, 10 lecturers elaborated from different angles the significance for a harmonious relationship between regional development and the protection of natural resources, and the role environmental protection policies play in promoting regional sustainable development. Xie Zhenhua, minister in charge of the State Environmental Protection Administration, said that China plans to reduce pollutants by another 10 percent in the five years to come. Enterprises that cause pollution will be punished according to law. He said that the Chinese government will invest more in sewage treatment, aiming to make half of the urban wastewater clean by the year 2004, 35 percent more than it is now. Vinod Thomas, vice-president of the World Bank, reminded policy makers not to simply woo the economic growth speed, saying that "much as the nutrition quality of diets determines people's health, the quality of growth determines its impact on people's welfare." Thomas called on the decision makers to pay more attention to a quality economic growth. Speakers at the forum also included Yukon Huang, chief of the World Bank's Resident Mission in China and director of China Program, Claude Martin, director-general of the World Wild Fund for Nature, and Zhang Kunmin, secretary-general of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development. |
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