Keeping the red line for cultivated land is key to advancing ecological civilization
On June 3, the State Council Information Office held a briefing, inviting experts to introduce the situation regarding China's ecological civilization development. Zhang Xiaoling, assistant to the director of the Land Surveying and Planning Institute of the Ministry of Land and Resources, believes that advancing ecological civilization requires keeping the red line for cultivated land.
Regarding how to use land in the process of advancing ecological civilization, Zhang Xiaoling said that in the process of advancing ecological civilization, the task of land management is very heavy, and China's human-land relationship is very tense. Major ecological construction projects (returning farmland to forest, returning grazing land to grassland, returning farmland to wetland), adjusting the industrial structure, and developing tourism and leisure industries all require the use of land, but first the red line for cultivated land must be kept, as this concerns our future economic and social development and national rejuvenation; in addition, extensive land use is now fairly common, and future urban construction land must emphasize the economical use of land resources.
“China's current ecological situation is not optimistic.” Wang Huanliang, director of the Economic Development Research Center of the State Forestry Administration, introduced that the forest ecosystem is relatively fragile, with forest coverage of only 21.63%, and forest quality is relatively poor; land desertification and rocky desertification are severe, with desertified land area of 1.73 million sq km, accounting for 18% of the national land area; soil erosion is relatively severe, with total soil erosion area now 2.95 million sq km, accounting for 30.7% of the national land area; wetland destruction is still difficult to curb so far, with the total area of wetlands in the country larger than 8 hectares per single patch at 804 million mu, and China's wetland loss rate over the past 50 years reaching 21.6%.
“Since reform and opening up, China's economy has grown at a high speed of around 10% annually, but at the same time there still exist problems of extensive growth patterns and excessively high resource and environmental costs.” Expert analysis believes that this is mainly manifested in tightening resource constraints, severe environmental pollution, and ecosystem degradation, showing the characteristics of high input, high consumption, high emissions, and non-circularity in production methods. Facing these problems, the Party Central Committee and the State Council have made a series of decisions and arrangements, exploring a development path in which the economy and society are coordinated with resources and the environment, and striving to blaze a modernization path with Chinese characteristics.