Fifty golden years of going green
Qu Geping, 92, the first director of China’s Environmental Protection Agency, has been looking back to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, the Swedish capital.
Staged from June 5 to 16 and also known as the Stockholm Conference, the event was the first global gathering of its kind to make the environment a major issue.
“Not many people in China had any idea of modern environmental concepts before the 1970s,” Qu said.
Over the past 50 years huge progress has been made on environmental issues.
In a message to a recent high-level online policy dialogue, one of the events held to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stockholm Conference, Qu said: “In the course of human environmental protection China has transformed from a passive, then active participant, to a major player.”
The conference was one of the most important international gatherings joined by China immediately after its return to the U.N. in 1971, Qu said.
“It offered us an opportunity to go out of the country to see the world, and made us begin to wake up to existing environmental problems. It started a great new journey for Chinese people on environmental awakening.”
After the Stockholm Conference the Chinese government held the first national environmental protection meeting in 1973, led by Premier Zhou Enlai, Qu said. The meeting marked the start of environmental protection work in China.
“Following nearly 50 years of endeavors, China has had remarkable achievements in environmental pollution control and natural ecosystem conservation,” Qu said.
For example, when the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, the country’s forest coverage stood at 8%. By last year this had risen to about 23%, official figures show.
China accounted for 25% of the global net increase in leaf area from 2000 to 2017, according to NASA satellites.
Despite the environmental challenges posed by rapid industrialization and urbanization after the reform and opening-up policy was introduced in the late 1970s, Qu said, China has taken solid steps in establishing and improving legal, policy and governance systems for environmental protection.
These systems “have laid good foundations for the country to further forge ahead with sustainable development, promote the construction of ecological civilization and green, low-carbon and circular development”, he said.
Ecological civilization is a concept promoted by President Xi Jinping for balanced and sustainable development featuring harmonious coexistence between humans and nature.
Since the central leadership placed ecological civilization top of the agenda, huge environmental changes have taken place.
Martin Lees, former U.N. assistant secretary general, lauded China for the rapid progress it has made in tackling climate change.
“When China realized that it was vulnerable to climate change — when it became an issue for China itself — they moved pretty rapidly and very intelligently to tackle the problem.”
Wang Jinnan, head of the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, said the country’s development has been increasingly green and low-carbon.
From 2013 to last year China’s GDP rose 94%, and the number of cars nationwide rose 150%, he said.
During this time energy consumption fell 16% and carbon emissions per unit of GDP 22%, said Wang, also an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
In 2020 President Xi announced that China aimed to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and realize carbon neutrality before 2060. Last year he said the country would stop building coal-fired power plants overseas.
China has signed 41 collaboration agreements on climate change with 36 developing countries and provided training programs for about 2,000 officials and technicians in climate-related posts in 120 countries.
Xie Zhenhua, China’s special envoy for climate change affairs, said: “Five decades after the Stockholm Conference, no matter what happens internationally, no matter what challenges confront nations around the world, China will stick to its resolve to tackle climate change and be an important participant, contributor and torchbearer in global endeavors for an ecological civilization.”