China's environmental stance

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China 'unfairly seen as eco-villain'

 

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* * * *VIEWPOINT

William Bleisch *

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*China's rapid economic expansion in recent years has been matched by its

increasingly voracious appetite for energy and natural resources, says

William Bleisch. But, as he explains in this week's Green Room, the nation

has sometimes been unfairly portrayed as the world's biggest environmental

villain.*

** * *

* China has also made dramatic strides in protecting the best examples of

natural habitats in nature reserves and other protected areas

*

 

*As early as 1995, Lester Brown, one of the world's leading

environmentalists, predicted that China's increasing demand for food and

other commodities would soon drive world prices to record highs. *

 

*If the figures were alarming then, they have only grown more so as China's

prosperity has increased its global reach and purchasing power. *

 

*Cries of alarm have come from more and more people, as China's demand for

everything from oil to hardwood timber has been blamed for global price

rises. *

 

*The increasing affluence of Chinese consumers and their new-found ability

to travel the world means that far more of them have the opportunity and the

means to purchase tiger skins, ivory and rhinoceros horn. *

 

*And as the nation's energy and mining industries have ventured beyond the

nation's borders, they have turned out to be every bit as rapacious and

unethical as western companies can be; perhaps more so, since they do not

have to answer to an open press and domestic outrage. *

 

*Growing appetite*

 

*The impacts of China's affluence are being felt downstream as well, in the

form of greenhouse gases emissions.*

** * *

*China has huge reserves of fossil fuels, such as coal*

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*China 'to be largest energy

user'*<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7082475.stm>

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*CO2 emissions from China are increasing faster than from any other country

in the world. *

 

*In 1990, it already accounted for some 10.5% of the world's CO2 emissions.

Now, according to some analyses, China has become the world's largest

emitter of climate-altering gases. *

 

*The backlash has been predictable. China's exemption from caps on

greenhouse gas emissions was one of the major reasons why the US Senate

unanimously rejected the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. *

 

*It was a powerful justification for the Bush administration's stance on

Kyoto. *

 

*The politicians believed that US efforts would be pointless if China's

emissions continued to grow. *

 

*But are the criticisms entirely fair? First, markets and emissions must be

considered relative to China's enormous population and fairly recent

emergence as a newly industrialised nation. *

 

*China's population of 1.3 billion is about four times larger than that of

the US, but each Chinese citizen uses about 25% of the energy consumed by

his or her US counterpart. *

 

*Even that measure is skewed, because much of that energy used in China is

to manufacture goods that are then purchased by Americans, Europeans and

Japanese. *

 

*The current rates of emissions also hide the fact that the industrialised

western nations (including Japan) have been belching out CO2 far longer than

China, which only reached newly industrialised status in the 1990s. *

 

*Exotic tastes*

 

*China certainly deserves criticism for its impacts on other areas of the

environment. *

 

*Chinese consumers have a large and growing appetite for exotic medicines

that has directly led to dozens of species in China and throughout the world

becoming endangered. *

 

*Its citizens are still responsible for consumption of staggering amounts of

wildlife and threatened timber products, some illegally smuggled from as far

away as Indonesia and Zimbabwe. *

 

*In 2008, several US states moved to ban turtle trapping on public lands,

and 12 more US turtle species have been proposed for the endangered species

list - all because of the impact of trade to China.*

** * *

* Illegal wildlife products have largely disappeared from shops and markets

in much of China, as enforcement of wildlife laws has become clearer and

more effective

*

 

*But even with regard to trade in wildlife, the story is hardly as simple as

it is often portrayed. *

 

*China signed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species

(Cites) and put it into force in 1981, passing legislation soon after to

back up the treaty. *

 

*In many areas, the government has made dramatic strides in controlling

wildlife trade over the past 20 years, even as demand has sky-rocketed due

to consumers' new affluence. *

 

*Illegal wildlife products have largely disappeared from shops and markets

in much of China, as enforcement of wildlife laws has become clearer and

more effective. *

 

*Gone are the days when tiger bone wine could be openly advertised, and

monkeys and wild caught parrots were openly sold in markets. *

 

*The tiger brand plasters found in every Chinese pharmacy contain no tiger,

and the tiger and leopard skins sold to foolish westerners at many tourist

traps are actually just poorly dyed dog skins. *

 

*Chinese consumers seeking to stock up on threatened wildlife must now

travel to neighbouring countries, where unscrupulous local dealers still

feel safe offering them a multitude of products, both fake and real. *

 

*China has also made dramatic strides in protecting the best examples of

natural habitats in nature reserves and other protected areas. *

 

*More than 15% of the nation's land area is legally protected in thousands

of nature reserves and national parks, and most national reserves now have

full-time staff that carry out regular patrols. *

 

*The proposal and approval of the enormous Giant Panda Sanctuary World

Heritage Natural Site in the Sichuan Qionglai Mountains is just one of the

most recent examples of China's political will and dedication to protecting

world natural heritage. *

 

*This is essential, since the rapid pace of development means that natural

ecosystems outside protected areas are under increasing threat from the

relentless search for more land and resources. *

 

*Controlling the breakneck development has proved to be difficult or

impossible for many regions, but a new law on Environmental Impact

Assessments, which became effective in September 2003, has been praised as a

model of good legislation. *

 

*It includes provisions to increase protection for critical habitats and

protected areas. There is still a major gap between policy and

implementation, but it may not be long before the " Three Simultaneous

Commencements " (the start of permit application, the start of the

environmental impact assessment and the start of digging) becomes a thing of

the past, at least in the country's more progressive regions. *

 

*Team effort*

 

*China has made impressive efforts to rise to standards set by the

international community, but the efforts have not always been good enough to

stem the tide in the face of massive and growing pressures. *

* * *China has experienced a number of environmental disasters recently*

 

*It can be argued that none of this will mean much if China's greenhouse gas

emissions cause climate disasters to habitats and species throughout the

world. *

 

*But here too, China has responded to global needs. *

 

*It signed the Kyoto Protocol of the UN Framework Convention on Climate

Change (UNFCCC) in 1998 and ratified the Protocol in 2002, something that

the US failed to do. *

 

*More importantly, it made emissions reduction a national policy in 2005,

when the nation's 11th Five-Year Plan (for 2006 to 2010) set a target of

reducing energy consumption per unit of GDP by 20%. *

 

*The EU gave itself a similar target, but has until 2020 to achieve it; US

plans are less ambitious still. *

 

*Given the pattern of exaggeration and over-statement often seen in the

international press, it is little wonder that strident international

criticism just seems to be dismissed as sour grapes by most people in China.

*

 

*Is it time, as many Chinese critics argue, for westerners to back off and

tend to their own houses? *

 

*Perhaps. But isn't it the responsibility of all, both producer nations and

consumer nations, to work together to solve problems such as depletion of

ocean fisheries and over-exploitation of threatened species? *

 

*We might hope that at least global climate change is so much of a clear and

present danger that, for once, countries could put aside their differences

and act together to find a workable solution, perhaps based on the seemingly

fair standard of a " climate change allocation " for each person on the

planet. *

 

*China should respond to critics by providing clear answers detailing what

is being done to solve real problems. And that is not " China-bashing " ; the

same could be said of every fully industrialised nation. *

 

*Global problems demand global accountability; and that creates a

responsibility of each of us to point out when policy and implementation are

failing, and to help each nation rise to the needs. *

 

*Dr William Bleisch is science director of the China Exploration & Research

Society*

 

*The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics

running weekly on the BBC News website*