This Integrated Reform Plan for Promoting Ecological Progress, issued jointly by the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the State Council of China, is a comprehensive reform plan aimed at promoting ecological progress in China, emphasizing the importance of integrating environmental conservation into all aspects of development. The planning period is 2015-2020. According yo the Plan, development is good only when it is green, circular, and low-carbon. There should be the right balance between development and conservation. The intensity of development should be brought under control on the basis of functional zoning and spatial planning should be adjusted to ensure that development and conservation are coordinated and reinforce each other. The objectives of the reform include: to establish a systematic and complete institutional framework composed of eight systems for promoting ecological progress with clearly defined property rights, diversified participation, and equal focus on incentives and restraints by 2020; to modernize China’s governance system and capacity for governance in the field of ecological progress and usher in a new era for socialist ecological progress. These eight systems include a system of property rights for natural resource assets, a system for the development and protection of territorial space, a spatial planning system, a system for regulating total consumption and comprehensive conservation of resources, a system for payment-based resource consumption and compensating conservation and protection efforts, the environmental governance system, the market system for environmental governance and ecological preservation, and the system for evaluating officials’ ecological conservation performance and for holding those responsible for ecological damage to account.
China · 2015-09-21