China's premier has vowed to make local officials more accountable for pollution problems after finding that eight of the 20 environmental goals set by the government five years ago were not met, state media reported yesterday.
Wen Jiabao (
Wen vowed that environmental protection will be used as a factor in assessing officials' performance, the paper said, without giving specifics.
The country's failure to meet almost half of its environmental targets over the last five years was due to a "lack of awareness, insufficient planning, illogical industrial structure and a weak legal framework," Wen was quoted as saying at a two-day conference on environmental protection that ended in Beijing on Tuesday.
The meeting coincided with some of the worst air pollution to hit Beijing in years. City officials on Tuesday were forced to seed clouds to clear a mixture of yellow grit and smog that blanketed the city after a Sunday dust and sand storm that was described as the worst in five years.
"We cannot just sit for discussions behind the closed door while the sandy weather has raged outside for more than 10 days," the People's Daily newspaper quoted Wen as saying. "Besides climatic factors, it mirrors the critical environmental situation we are facing."
China's government has been replanting "green belts" of trees throughout the north in an effort to trap the dust after decades when the storms worsened amid heavy tree-cutting.
Between 2000 and last year, China failed to meet its goals in reducing emissions of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, improving wastewater treatment and limiting industrial solid waste discharges, the China Daily said. The paper did not specify the other four targets that had not been met.
The government says that some 340 million people in rural China lack access to water considered clean enough to drink and since November last year the country has had at least 70 pollution incidents in rivers.
The deputy head of the State Environmental Protection Agency said last month that if China continues with its current patterns of consumption and environmental protection, pollution will increase fourfold over the next 15 years.
A report Monday by the Guangdong Provincial Environment Protection Bureau said that drinking water in the booming southern cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou was found to have unacceptable levels of pollutants including nitrogen and fecal coliforms, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
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