Stepping up the fight against pollution: China Daily editorial

The central leadership has called for a nationwide battle to prevent and control pollution, while setting specific targets for cleaner air and water and drawing up plans to tackle carbon emissions.

In a circular jointly released by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council, China's Cabinet, on Sunday, the authorities vowed that by 2025 they will reduce carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 18 percent compared with the level in 2020. With other goals to be achieved by that year including decreasing the intensity of PM 2.5 by 10 percent; increasing the proportion of days with good air quality to 87.5 percent; and ensuring that the proportion of surface water of relatively good quality should be above 85 percent.

Such goals are already included in the country's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) for national economic and social development, and will have a direct bearing on people's well-being and sense of happiness. They are also indispensable for China to peak its carbon emissions before 2030, and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, two pledges the country's top leader has made to the rest of the world.

Victory in the environmental fight, as the document said, will ensure that by 2035, a green way of life and production will have been formed and the ecological environment will have improved markedly, which means the goal of building a "beautiful China" will be basically attained.

Given the anti-pollution experiences the country has accumulated over the past decades, and the central leadership's resolve to seek green development as the economy transitions from high-speed to high-quality growth, there is every reason to believe that the environmental goals will be realized despite the challenges.

Most importantly, the central government has put the building of an ecological civilization on top of its agenda. China has already worked out a complete set of targeted, scientific, and law-based pollution prevention and control measures to tackle air, water, soil and solid waste pollution, with encouraging results having been achieved. A scientific evaluation system has also been put in place to assess the performance of officials in terms of environmental protection.

Thanks to a three-year plan to bring back blue skies, cities across the country had witnessed marked progress in air quality by the end of last year. Beijing, which used to be smothered by smog in winter, saw no heavily polluted skies from the beginning of autumn to Dec 27 last year, with good air quality lasting for a record 40-plus days compared with all previous autumns and winters.

By continuing to fix its pollution problems and resolutely pursuing an ecological civilization, China will make a huge contribution to the global fight against climate change.