'Green GDP' reflects shifting
priorities By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - Increasingly aware of the
deteriorating state of China's environment, the
Chinese leadership has decided that it wants the
national economy to not only grow fast, but grow
green. They have asked state planners to develop a
new indicator to measure the country's growth, a
"green GDP", which would account for the costs of
environmental impact and resource consumption.
The emphasis on "green GDP" reflects
China's slowly shifting priorities from sustaining
growth at all costs to realizing more sustainable
growth.
Beijing has just unveiled
a draft blueprint for the country's economic
development in the next five years, which stresses
the need for conservation of natural resources.
The two indicators that have defined China's
economic miracle for the past 20 years - economic
growth and the increase in disposable incomes -
will no
longer
be enough to assess the
performance of government officials. By making
local leaders accountable for resource squandering
and pollution, Beijing hopes to put the brakes on
rapidly unfolding environmental destruction. But
in their "go green" quest, Chinese leaders face a
growing challenge: how to enforce environmental
standards without crippling the economic growth.
Consider just a few of the difficult dilemmas.
Saving the country's rivers has become a
rallying cry for both environment-friendly
government officials and green activists, as the
nation comes to grips with the reality that more
than half of the water in China's seven largest
rivers is contaminated. But saving China's rivers
means that the energy-hungry country would
continue to rely on the coal-fired power stations
that currently supply more than two-thirds of its
energy, spewing out vast amounts of pollutants in
the process.
Pollution levels in China
could more than quadruple within 15 years if the
country doesn't curb its rapid growth in energy
consumption, Zhang Lijun, a senior environmental
official, warned recently. China's emissions of
sulfur dioxide were the highest in the world last
year, causing acid rain across 30% of the country,
a report released by the State Environmental
Protection Agency said.
Developers are
eager to boost power generation any way they can
and argue that the solution lies with developing
more hydropower, which they have promoted as
"green". Last year, Minister of Water Resources
Wang Shucheng predicted that construction of
hydropower plants in China would peak in 20 to 25
years, as the water resources of the remaining few
untamed rivers in the country are tapped.
No fewer than 46 new, large dams are now
being planned or are under construction in the
Yangtze River basin alone, according to the
International Journal on Hydropower and Dams.
Although planned to control devastating floods
while producing emissions-free power, many of them
are being built at least partly in order to
prevent silt build-up at the Three Gorges Dam, the
world's largest hydropower project.
Damming the rivers means not only altering
the natural environment of their ecosystems but
also the displacement of thousands of people.
Chinese researchers have estimated that about 10
million of the 16 million people displaced by
large hydropower plants since the communist
victory in 1949 were still poor - despite
officials' claims that hydropower raised living
standards. This has added a social dimension to
Beijing's dilemma. Peasants in impoverished rural
areas are no longer a silent driving force of
China's unbridled growth, and are increasingly
protesting against the dams, contaminated water
and deforestation.
Driven by sometimes
clashing agendas, it comes as no surprise that
officials are issuing contradictory pro-growth and
pro-green announcements. The same water resources
official who championed large-scale hydropower
development said recently China needed to limit
the development along its major rivers and
restrict the utilization ratio to protect the
environment. "Our primary task is to maintain the
natural environment and healthy life of rivers,
not [to] exploit water resources at any cost,"
Wang Shucheng told a forum on river conservation
held in Zhengzhou, Henan province in
October.
In fact, Beijing faces such
uneasy tradeoffs in nearly every ambitious aspect
of its green pronouncements. Air pollution and
autos provide another good example.
As
newly rich Chinese citizens demand the consumerist
trappings of their counterparts in the developed
world, China's car fleet has exploded, choking
large cities' traffic and air. After growing 50%
on average in each of the last three years, car
sales are projected to rise from 4.4 million
annually in 2003 to 13 million within 10 years,
according to official forecasts. China's roads are
expected to be clogged with 130 million vehicles
by 2020, by which time China will have surpassed
the United States in total car ownership.
But environmental concerns have risen in
parallel with the phenomenal growth of China's
automotive sector. The country is already the
world's second-largest producer of greenhouse
gases, which contribute to global warming and the
devastation of the climate. If they remain
uncontrolled, the growth of China's carbon dioxide
emissions over the next twenty years will dwarf
any cuts in emissions that the rest of the world
can make.
Last year, the government
announced plans for tough new fuel-economy
standards for domestically produced cars and
trucks. Proposals are discussed to introduce new
taxes on vehicle purchases too. But limiting the
prodigious growth of China's automotive market is
not only difficult but also politically explosive.
China's car industry, the world's fastest-growing,
has become one of the pillars of the country's
economy, providing jobs and bringing large tax
revenues. For China's expanding middle class,
acquiring one or two cars has become a symbol of
the country's aspiration to match the living
standards of the developed world.
Environmentalists reckon that shattering
China's middle-class dream would be as difficult
as persuading government officials to give up
their fondness for staggering growth figures.
"China can no longer afford to sacrifice
environmental concerns," says Xue Ye, executive
director of Friends of Nature, China's largest
civil environmental group. "The problem is that
the government's policy on growing green hasn't
become a law yet, and there remains difficulty
with its local enforcement."
On paper at
least, the government has promised during the 11th
five-year plan for 2006-2011 to boost
environmental spending to 1.3 trillion yuan
(US$169 billion) over five years, representing
some 1.6% of GDP, up from just 0.8% during the
early 1990s.
But an investigation by
the State Environmental Protection Agency in
2004 found that local authorities throughout
the country failed to realize the green targets
set during the previous five-year plan.
Officials admit that many emissions-reduction schemes
fell short of their targets, and that construction
of some 700 major projects aimed at cutting
water pollution - half the total planned by Beijing
for the 2001- 2005 period - had yet to
begin.
