Full Text: Integrated Reform Plan for Promoting Ecological Progress (3)

A spatial planning system will be designed, with the main purpose of strengthening the spatial governance and improving its structure, which is nationally unified and better connected between different departments of government, and according to which management is divided between governments at multiple levels, in an effort to eliminate overlapping and conflicting spatial plans, the overlap and duplication of responsibilities between departments, and the issue of local authorities frequently changing their plans.

An effective, standardized,and strictly managed system that achieves complete coverage will be established for regulating total consumption and comprehensive conservation of resources, in order to address inefficiency and serious waste in resource consumption.

A system for payment-based resource consumption and compensating conservation and protection efforts will be established. The system will reflect market supply and demand, resource scarcity, the value of nature, and the need for intergenerational compensation, in order to address the problems of excessively low prices for natural resources and their products, the cost of production and development being lower than the social cost, and inadequate incentives for ecological conservation efforts.

An environmental governance system which is oriented toward improving the environment, and which incorporates unified regulation, strict law enforcement, and multi-party participation will be developed in an effort to deal with weak capacity for pollution prevention and control, overlapping regulatory functions between government departments, powers not being in accord with responsibilities, and the cost of law violations being too low.

A market system which allows economic levers to play a greater role in environmental governance and ecological conservation will be developed, with a view to addressing the slow development of market entities and market systems and low rates of public participation in ecological conservation.

An evaluation and accountability system will be developed to assess the performance of officials in ecological conservation and hold to account those responsible for ecological damage. This system will be designed to be fully reflective of resource consumption, environmental damage, and ecological benefits, and is to be built so as to correct the shortcomings in performance evaluations, narrow the gaps in responsibility systems, and improve poor accountability for ecological damage.

II. Improving the System of Property Rights for Natural Resource Assets

5. Establishing a unified system for determining and registering ownership

The owners of natural resource assets of all types throughout all Chinese territorial space will be determined in accordance with the principles that all natural resources in China are publicly owned and all property rights are legally prescribed. Ownership of all natural ecological spaces including water flows, forests, mountains, grasslands, uncultivated land, and tidal flats will, according to a unified system, be determined and registered. Clear lines will be gradually delineated to distinguish between assets owned by the whole people and assets collectively owned,ownership by the whole people and ownership operated by different levels of government, and between different collective owners. The rule of law will be strengthened in the determination and registration of ownership.

6. Establishing a system of property rights for natural resources within which rights and responsibilities are explicit

A list of rights will be developed to specify the rights of ownership for all types of natural resource assets. The relationship between ownership rights and use rights will be properly dealt with. New forms of collective ownership and ownership by the whole people will be created. With the exception of natural resources which are ecologically important, the ownership rights and use rights for all other natural resources can be separated. It will be made clear who has the right to possess, use, benefit from, or dispose of natural resources, and corresponding rights and responsibilities will be clarified. The right to sell, transfer, and rent out use rights, as well as the right to use them as collateral, as the basis of a loan guaranty, or to gain an equity stake, will all be suitably expanded. The roles of owners and users of land on which state-owned farms, forests, and pastures are located will be clearly defined. A complete system for sale will be established covering all types of natural resource assets owned by the whole people, while the uncompensated transfer of rights or their sale at excessively low a price are to be strictly forbidden. We will draw up an integrated plan for strengthening efforts to develop a natural resource asset exchange. (mo