“Environmental protection must be both rigorous and scientific; firmly opposed to Procrustean bed policies, and it is not something to being conducted in a perfunctory way,” said Mr. He Keng, Vice-Chairman of the Financial and Economic Committee of the twelfth session of NPC, Chief economist of the IEEPA. Looking back at the work on environmental protection over the past few years, the achievements have been quite mainstream, but some “one-size-fits-all” or non-scientific policies linger on. We should be summarizing our experiences and learning from our mistakes. First and foremost, environmental protection must be both strict and scientific; otherwise, we risk triggering serious consequences.
Mr. He Keng suggested there are three key elements to environmental protection, being scientific, guaranteeing efficiency and guaranteeing feasibility. All these key elements must be applied simultaneously. Analyzing related approaches and policies is also vital. In order to reach conclusions, we must conduct comparative tests on everything, always exercising caution and paying attention to the feasibility of our scientific methods.
“Government shall the take hard line of strengthening legislation on environmental protection which is supposed to take measures based on law. There are two ways for specific implementation, one is administrative measures, the market economy is another,” Mr. He Keng said bluntly. The former way has been taken some great drawbacks in previous years. However, the latter way which involves market mechanisms such as differential taxation and prices while not producing immediate results is very effective over the long-term. However, markets mechanisms have not been extensively used. Therefore, it’s time for eco-friendly mechanisms to step in. Environmental protection is everybody’s duty, not just the duty of entrepreneurs in the sector. Market mechanisms can both and punish reward environmental protection efforts, and this will have an effect over the long-term. Such mechanisms are necessary if environmental protection efforts are to become more effective.
