13th Five-Year Plan Sets Green Development Tone: Circular Economy Becomes the Only Way for Green Urbanization
On November 3, Premier Li Keqiang said in his speech at the closing ceremony of the China-France Forum on Climate and Green Economy that taking the path of green development is an inevitable requirement for transforming the development model and adjusting the economic structure. China will follow the arrangements of the just-concluded Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee, including following the concept of green development, and will continue to broaden the win-win path of economic growth and environmental improvement and open up new prospects for ecological civilization construction by transforming the development model, adjusting the structure and promoting economic quality and efficiency.
In the Recommendations of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Formulating the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development, “green development” was emphasized many times, and in the relevant statements on urbanization construction, the concept of “green development” runs throughout.
Zhang Yong, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, pointed out at the “2015 China Circular Economy Development Forum” that the carrying capacity of resources and the environment must be taken as a precondition, that the main functional strategy must be unswervingly implemented in spatial layout, that the planning system must be improved, and that production space, living space and ecological space must be laid out and improved scientifically and rationally. [Development should] be concentrated in areas with comparative advantages, and differentiated market access policies should be implemented for different projects.
“In the process of urbanization, a reasonable macro layout for urbanization must be built, the development of urbanization must be promoted from extensive expansion to connotative improvement, and green ecological urban areas must be built. In the construction of new rural areas, the construction of beautiful villages must be accelerated, so that ecological civilization construction extends to rural areas and benefits the broad masses of the people.” Zhang Yong pointed out, “Greening essentially requires raising the degree of greening in layout, production methods, lifestyles, values and concepts.”
Industry experts told the reporter of China Business Journal that under the situation in which environmental protection receives high attention, developing the circular economy has become the only way for new urbanization.
New urbanization highlights “green”
The just-concluded Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee took the study and formulation of recommendations for the “13th Five-Year” Plan as its main agenda, and ecological civilization construction was written into the task goals of a five-year plan for the first time. Premier Li Keqiang pointed out that green, low-carbon and circular economy development should be taken as important content of ecological civilization construction.
Behind large-scale, high-speed urbanization, China's urban and rural development is encountering increasingly severe resource and environmental constraints.
The recommendations for the “13th Five-Year” Plan put forward a number of key requirements for urbanization. Compared with the “12th Five-Year” period, these requirements are more specific and place greater emphasis on implementation.
For example, it proposes adjusting city size according to the carrying capacity of resources and the environment, and optimizing urban form and functions based on mountains, rivers and landforms; improving the level of socialist new rural construction and carrying out actions to improve rural human settlements; promoting coordinated regional development and increasing support for difficult areas such as those with exhausted resources and severe ecological degradation, and so on. Under the guidance of these concepts, during the “13th Five-Year” period China's urbanization will accelerate its pace of transition toward “green.”
In March 2014, the state promulgated the National New Urbanization Plan, and the “13th Five-Year” period is the five years in which the National New Urbanization Plan is fully implemented.
Feng Kui, secretary-general of the Academic Committee of the China Center for Urban Development, pointed out that past urbanization, apart from insufficient innovation, had prominent problems such as insufficient coordination, insufficient greenness, insufficient openness and insufficient sharing. In addition to innovative development, the current advocacy of coordinated development, green development, open development and shared development is highly targeted for urbanization.
Speaking of green urbanization, Feng Kui believes that insufficient greenness intuitively means that the living environment has been damaged. He also pointed out problems such as the backwardness of various ecological, energy-saving, environmental-protection and high-efficiency industries in urban and rural areas, high building energy consumption, and high emissions from transportation vehicles.
Experts say that during the “13th Five-Year” period, green development will become the main tone, and green urbanization will enter a stage of real implementation.
Developing the circular economy becomes the focus
Industry experts point out that as environmental protection receives increasing attention, circular economy development, as a major current national development strategy, has become the only way for new urbanization.
At the “2015 China Circular Economy Development Forum” held on October 31, Zhao Jiarong, president of the China Association of Circular Economy, said that this year is the final year of the “12th Five-Year” period. China has promoted circular economy development at the national level and has gone through two development periods, the “11th Five-Year” and the “12th Five-Year” periods. With the strong promotion of relevant departments, local governments and all sectors of society, circular economy development has achieved remarkable results and has played an important role in adjusting the industrial structure, transforming the development model, building ecological civilization and promoting sustainable development.
“All humanity is exploring how the economy and society should develop and how to coordinate economic growth with resources and the environment.” Yang Chunping, director of the Circular Economy Research Office of the Institute of Economic System and Management of the National Development and Reform Commission, introduced that in the process of exploration, the circular economy is the earliest-appearing, most mature and most operational development model and growth mode. Yang Chunping pointed out that developing the circular economy is precisely to resolve the contradiction between economic development and resources and the environment, and to meet the requirements of resource constraints and environmental quality improvement.
He Bingguang, director of the Department of Resource Conservation and Environmental Protection of the National Development and Reform Commission, believes that during the “13th Five-Year” period, under the background of greening, circular economy development should be promoted from six aspects: green thinking, green orientation, green layout, green production, green lifestyle and green sharing.
“‘13th Five-Year’ circular economy scientific and technological innovation should, according to the different requirements of industry, agriculture and urban areas, follow the idea of full life-cycle management and determine the direction of technological development in response to prominent problems faced in development.” Qian Yi, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor at Tsinghua University, pointed out that in cities, research should be conducted on reducing household waste, urban wastewater should shift toward resource recovery and energy recovery, and the service industry should also become greener. In rural areas, agricultural development has produced a series of problems such as non-point source pollution, groundwater overexploitation and rural waste. Particular attention should be paid to circular economy scientific and technological innovation in agriculture and rural areas. At the same time, scientific and technological innovation in these areas should have rural characteristics and cannot completely copy the urban model.
Yin Ruiyu, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and former vice minister of the Ministry of Metallurgical Industry, proposed that developing the circular economy should adhere to the “3R” principles, optimize and integrate the five elements of materials, energy, time, space and capital, and implement the circular economy with industrial ecological parks, “urban mining,” industrial transformation and upgrading, waste resource treatment and industrial waste heat as entry points.
Zhu Dajian, a member of the Global Council on Circular Economy of the World Economic Forum and director of the Institute of Sustainable Development and Management at Tongji University, suggested shifting from focusing on “resource productivity” to “placing equal emphasis on resource productivity and controlling the total amount of waste generated,” and realizing three advances in circular economy development from “waste circulation” to “product circulation” and then to “service circulation.”
At present, various regions are accelerating the development of the circular economy.
Recently, the Beijing Municipal Development and Reform Commission, together with the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision and other departments, formulated the Implementation Plan for Advancing Standardization Work on Energy Conservation, Low Carbon and Circular Economy in Beijing (2015-2022), which has been officially issued by the General Office of the Beijing Municipal People's Government. According to Zhang Guohong, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Development and Reform Commission, in recent years Beijing's current standards in the fields of energy conservation, low carbon and circular economy have reached 207, with 142 under research and 94 planned for formulation or revision.