This Plan is a cross-sectoral policy document at regional level, aiming at promoting development in the western regions during the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020). According to the Plan, basic infrastructure and ecological protection are key issues, and efforts should be made to advance coordinated development in urbanization, industrialization, informatization, and agricultural modernization. The Plan seeks to improve the agricultural infrastructure and implement the food security projects for grain harvest, storage and supply. One of priorities is to improve grain production capacity in major agricultural production areas such as Guangxi, Gansu, Xinjiang, and ensure national food security. Upgrading the water conservancy infrastructure is one of the main tasks proposed by the Plan. It requests to strengthen the construction of major water conservancy projects, at the same time, start to build a number of major water transfer projects, key water source projects, river and lake backbone treatment projects and large-scale irrigation projects, and strive to improve water security capabilities. The Plan comprehensively promotes modernization (including agricultural modernization) and coordinated development. It firmly emphasizes ecological and environmental protection. The priorities include: implement “double control”(energy consumption control and energy intensity control) mechanism and the national energy conservation action plan, to promote energy-saving and emission reduction in key areas; Promote a low-carbon and green efficient development in the coal industry, coal power, coal chemistry industry, iron and steel, nonferrous metals, phosphorus chemical industry and other industries; Promote the ecological and green development concept, encourage the change of lifestyle to a green, recycling, low carbon way; Promote the development of low-carbon cycle, and continuously reduce the intensity of carbon emissions; etc. Actions contain: Increase air pollution prevention and efforts to improve the quality of the atmospheric environment; Strengthen the desulfurization, denitrification, dust removal facilities construction in key industries and operation management; Strictly control the high energy consumption and high-emission industries, orderly shutdown the companies which can not achieve the standards of environmental protection, energy consumption, and safety production standards; speed up the construction of green ecological corridors, to protect the ecological environment of the Three Gorges reservoir area, build an important ecological barrier in the upstream of the Yangtze River; Establish a market mechanism to attract social capital investment in ecological environment protection, promote a third party governance for environmental pollution control; promote corporate environmental credit evaluation, environmental pollution liability insurance, green credit pilot, etc. According to the Plan, progress should also be made to reduce poverty, improve people’s lives, social harmony, and ethic unity. One of the main tasks proposed in the Plan propose is winning the fight against poverty. The western region is considered as the “main battlefield” and “hard bone” that fights against poverty. The Plan requests to formulate policies for different types of poverty so as to improve the effectiveness of poverty alleviation. The Plan proposes to develop vigorously the production of safe agricultural products: encourage the expansion of the production area of pollution-free, green and safe agricultural products; increase the proportion of domestic livestock breeding and special fisheries, and promote the development of agriculture in the western region to the ecological and organic development; speed up the industrialization of safe agricultural products, improve the quality and safety level of agricultural products, and improve the quality and efficiency of agriculture; etc. The Plan further seeks to improve disaster prevention, mitigation and relief system. It requests: to establish a sound disaster prevention and disaster relief management system and operation mechanism, improve comprehensive prevention capabilities; to accelerate the capacity building in areas such as natural disaster monitoring and early warning, information management and service, risk management, recovery and reconstruction; to strengthen inter-departmental emergency response, disaster investigation and risk assessment in disaster-prone areas; carry out trade market for carbon emissions, emissions rights, etc. and gradually expand the scope of the pilot and demonstration projects.
China · 2017-01-17