Mr. Pan Yuelong, Vice Mayor of Yinchuan City, Mr. Deng Weigen, Vice Mayor of Foshan City, Mr. Yang Zhanli, Vice Mayor of Nantong City and Mr. Liu Li, Vice Mayor of Taizhou attended CCICED Roundtable Meeting held during April 22-23 and made a topic speech on behalf of each city.

Pan Yuelong, Vice Mayor of Yinchuan City pointed out in his presentation that when facilitating economic growth, Yinchuan adhered to the path of sustainable development, strived for “the most inhabitable and enterprising city” in Northwest China in order to have win-win situation in both economic development and environmental protection. The main measures are the followings: 1) adjust and optimize industrial structure and phase out out-of-date productivity. 2) vigorously facilitate the projects of energy saving and emission reduction projects and the application of such technologies. 3) implement “ecological” strategy and make more efforts in environmental protection. 4) implement the strategy of “People first, paying attention to people’s livelihood”. However, Yinchuan is still facing many challenges during the development process with the following reflections: First, total economic strength of Yinchuan is small in scale and weak in foundation with poor urban comprehensive competitive force in particular lack of financial power. Second, Yinchuan is facing hard task for industrial restructuring. It lacks capacity in innovation in the field of energy saving and emission reduction. It has high proportion of the industries with high energy consumption and heavy pollution and hard task in energy saving and emission reduction. Third, Yinchuan has poor capacity in self-adjustment and resisting natural disasters due to fragile eco environment system and big impacts of drought and desertification on urban environment. Fourth, It has not developed the layout of circular economy and industrial symbiosis. The links to circular economy have not been set up and public awareness in green production and consumption needs improvement.

Vice Mayor Deng Weigen of Foshan said, Foshan is a manufacturing base and its GDP ranks No.11 in all cities across China. Rapid economic development brings serious impacts on the environment. To facilitate the harmony between economic development and environmental protection, Foshan municipal government advocates the idea of “great environmental protection” to protect local environment and facilitate continuous economic growth. The idea of “great environmental protection” mainly include such contents as innovation of environmental protection work mechanism, shift of economic growth mode, change of environmental investment and financing mechanism and improvement of environmental law enforcement, which drive environmental protection focus from curbing environmental pollution to continuous improvement of environmental quality. This means the transformation from passive pollution treatment into active prevention of pollution and the transformation from single pollution treatment into comprehensive environmental control.

Vice Mayor Yang Zhanli of Nantong City said, it becomes a difficult problem for us as how to address the bottleneck among resources, energy and the environment. It will be a test on environmental governance of local government whether or not to successfully achieve strategic transformation of environment and development. Nantong municipal government adheres to the policy of environmental protection as the first priority, continuously makes innovation in thoughts about environmental protection and strives for the reduction of development pressure on the environment and resources. Being No.1 city in economic growth in Jiangsu Province for the third consecutive year, Nantong has achieved the target on emission reduction. In urban development, it advocates the design of development by eco ideas and regulated development by enhancing supervision & administration. It employs science & technology to support development and economic incentives to facilitate economic development. Meanwhile, Nantong is the first city in China to conduct SO2 emission trade and takes the lead in true trade of discharge right of water pollutants with good achievements.

Vice Mayor Liu Li of Taizhou City pointed out that without clean water and green mountains, there would be no “gold mountain and silver mountain”. Unilateral pursuit to economic growth will easily lead to environmental protection and eco imbalance. At municipal government level, we must adhere to the scientific outlook on development to make overall plan. Sticking to the policy on “environmental protection first and conservation first”, we place environmental protection and ecological development at more pre-eminent position. To achieve good and fast economic and social development, we must take the priority in planning, industrial restructuring, environmental investment and performance of government functions.