Tough pollution controls will be imposed in South China's Guangdong Province in a raft of measures aimed at making industry clean up its act.

The tougher measures include introducing strict upper limits of pollution emissions for each of the province's 21 cities.

New industrial projects will also have a higher environmental threshold to abide by, and it will be tougher for existing industries that are known polluters to have their licenses renewed.

Mountainous and rural areas will also be off limits to industries wanting to relocate from the Pearl River Delta region.

In another significant boost for the environment, the provincial authorities will "accelerate" the desulphurization work for power plants, and improve the online system that monitors key polluters.

"For the purpose, the province will apply the mechanism to evaluate the administration performance of the cities' leaders from how well they have done in the environmental protection," Li Qing, director-general of Guangdong Provincial Environmental Protection Administration, said.

He said that the province's strategy was to minimize new polluting projects while lowering the emission of sulfur dioxide and sewage drainage.

"Any new project will not be permitted to go ahead as long as its pollution standard does not come up to the environmental threshold the province has set for different cities," he said.

"And those cities whose total pollution volume is likely to go beyond the upper limit will not be allowed to approve any new project."

And the province will install power-generating units of 20,000 megawatts with desulphurization facilities by the end of this year.

Sewage disposal capacity will also be increased by another 1 million tons this year.

Hu Zhijun, director of Environment Comprehensive Administration of Guangzhou Development District, said the provincial environmental watchdog's tougher measures would not impose undue pressure for the district to secure investment or earn the expected GDP target.

"As a matter of fact, our district has gone a step ahead of the province in prioritizing environmental issues," he said.

"Our environmental threshold is higher and our investment for both desulphurization and sewage disposal has been more generous than any other district in Guangzhou and even than many cities in the province."

Projects that have not been allowed into the district in the past couple of years include those whose energy consumption or pollutant emission per unit GDP is higher than industry limits, Hu added.

But Liang Hongwei, an official with Shanwei Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation Bureau, said more iron-fisted environmental measures would burden his city and prevent it from luring investors and "realizing a good GDP score".

"If we weren't so concerned about the environmental issue, it would be much easier for us to benefit from the industrial transfer from the better developed Pearl River Delta Region and hence a higher GDP growth rate," Liang said.

However, he added, the efforts to nip pollution in the bud will in the long term be better for the city's sustained economic development.

"It will be too late and more expensive to deal with pollution when the air is not fresh any longer and water no longer clear," the official said.

According to Liu Xiuli, an associate professor of public administration with South China Normal University, making government officials accountable for the environment, by way of promotions and demerits was an effective scheme.

"They will be wise enough to balance between mere GDP and green GDP," she said

"And tougher measures for environmental protection will in the meantime boost the industrial shift to new and high-tech ones."

Liu suggested that the government should consider mapping out some preferential policies to help the polluting enterprises replace outdated production facilities with clean production technologies.

Guangdong has topped other provinces in both sewage disposing capacity and desulphurization capacity for several years.

Last year's emission of sulphur dioxide dropped 2.1 percent from 2005 in the province with the chemical oxygen demand (COD), which is an important parameter of water pollution, falling 0.9 percent from 2005. The province's GDP topped 2,500 billion yuan (US$321 billion) in 2006, a rise of 14.1 percent from 2005.

The achievements are in sharp contrast to the nation's performance which failed to reach its goal set early last year to save energy and reduce pollution discharge.

Official statistics indicate that Guangdong poured capital inputs of more than 60 billion yuan (US$7.69 billion) in 2006 for environmental protection, accounting for more than 2.5 percent of the province's GDP last year.

(China Daily March 28, 2007)