Full Text: Integrated Reform Plan for Promoting Ecological Progress (2)

3. The principles

Ensuring that the reform moves in the right direction. China's market mechanisms need to be improved, and the government should make better use of its leadership and regulatory roles. Those in the business sector should bring their own initiative into play and exercise self-restraint. Social organizations and the general public should participate and play a supervising role in ecological conservation.

Maintaining the public nature of natural resource assets. New property rights systems should be created for natural resources. Ownership rights should be clarified. There should be a distinction between ownership rights and the authority to manage. Powers and regulatory responsibilities of the central and local governments should be divided more appropriately. Everyone should be entitled to benefit from state-owned natural resource assets.

Integrating environmental governance for rural and urban areas. Continued efforts should be made to strengthen urban environmental protection and industrial pollution prevention and control. The rural coverage of ecological and environmental protection efforts should be expanded. Effective systems and mechanisms for rural environmental governance should be established. The development of pollution prevention and control facilities should be stepped up in rural areas, and related funding should be increased.

Attaching equal importance to incentives and restraints. It is imperative to develop interest-related mechanisms for promoting green, circular, and low-carbon development, and at the same time practice strict prevention at the source of pollution, strict regulation over operations, strict compensation for environmental damage, and accountability for those responsible in order to effectively restrain all types of market entities and, step by step, make ecological conservation efforts more market-, law-, and procedure-based.

Combining China's own independent efforts with international cooperation. Strengthening ecological conservation and environmental protection is something China is doing of its own accord, though at the same time it needs to deepen exchange and practical cooperation with other countries, borrow from their advanced technology and their valuable experience in institution building, take an active part in global environmental governance, and assume and perform its international responsibilities as a large developing country.

Integrating piloting first with overall coordination. It is necessary, in accordance with the unified plans of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, to deal with the easier parts first, move forward step by step, and launch each reform when conditions are ripe to do so. On the basis of the fundamental direction laid out in this plan, encouragement should be given to local governments to explore and experiment boldly in light of their own local conditions.

4. The objectives

This reform is designed 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. It is also designed 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.

A system of property rights for natural resource assets will be established, according to which ownership is clearly defined, powers and responsibilities are explicit, and regulation is effective, in order to ensure there are owners for natural resources and ownership is clear.

A system will be built on the basis of spatial planning for the development and protection of territorial space, drawing on regulation of its uses as the main approach, with a view to stopping the over-use of quality cropland and ecological space, ecological damage, and environmental pollution caused by disorderly, excessive, and scattered development. (mo