China will adopt a series of measures in the coming five years in a bid to curb the country's deteriorating environment, said a senior Chinese official Tuesday.

"We will strive to realize the general goals of basically stopping the deterioration of China's environment and improving the ecological quality in some key regions," said Xie Zhenhua, director of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA).

Claiming that the goals are only two key ones for China's ecological protection move during the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-2010), he said China would also strive to achieve the goals of stabilizing protected ecologies and nature reserves, stopping degradation in rural and pastoral interlacing areas, slowing the speed of biodiversity loss and effectively curbing the run-off of genetic resources of biospecies.

Despite the achievements in the past five years, he acknowledged, China's environmental situation remains quite serious and the environmental protection still faces many difficulties and problems.

Xie's viewpoints have widespread echoes among senior and even top Chinese officials.

"The present environmental situation in China is rather tough and grave in some places," warned Chinese President Hu Jintao when addressing a high-level Party seminar, claiming that without a healthy natural environment, people will have no clean water to drink, fresh air to breath, or healthy food to eat, which will result in serious social problems.

Chinese Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan also said earlier that the environmental protection and construction is a key task in building a harmonious socialist society and people should be provided with "clean water, fresh air and a sound environment".

Curbing pollution and improving the quality of the environment will be part of the evaluation of urban Party officials, said Zeng, adding that governments ought to mobilize all circles of the society to work together for the environmental protection.

The difficulties and problems China is now facing can largely be attributed to extensive use of resources and the tendency to pursue rapid local development but turn a blind eye to the environmental protection to some degree.

"One of the prominent problems is that some localities have showed the trend of reaping shortsighted benefits at the cost environmental losses," he said.

According to Xie, in order to realize the Five-Year Plan goals, the Chinese government will stress the work in six key aspects.

The aspects include rearranging overall industrial and resources layouts, enhancing construction of nature reserves and bio function areas, actively carrying forward coordinated development of regional societies, economies and environments, enhancing rural environmental protection and development supervision for bio purposes, and strengthening protection and safety oriented management of bio species resources.

All the localities must update their ideas so that they can better serve the national moves of environmental protection, said Xie.

SEPA earlier urged localities to speed up building pollution treatment projects along the country's most heavily-polluted rivers and lakes, saying that the construction was far behind what had been planned.

However, he said, there should be more investment, both governmental and civil, for environmental purposes, and the government should itself lift the capability in the environmental protection and the bio environmental evaluation should be carried out in an in-depth way.

In Chinese cities, people have found that after more than two decades of quick expansion and fast economic development, 661 cities, home to 41.7 percent of the country's 1.3 billion population, have developed at a huge cost to the environment.

Nearly two thirds of Chinese cities do not have sufficient water supply, and one in every six cities suffers severe water shortage. The situation was made worse with the widespread pollution in both surface and underground water resources.

However, what is far beyond people's imagination is that, according to experts, environmental problems have gone well beyond air, water or soil pollution and growing into possible deadly natural disasters.

Some experts said the raging floods triggered by torrential rain over the past few days in China that claimed hundreds of lives are largely a nemesis of prolonged reckless human activities in the past decades.

The government has put high on its agenda in recent years the issue of tackling environmental headaches, which have not only hindered its economic development but also possibly caused social unrest in some areas.

As another major move taken by the country to crack down on heavy polluters and reverse the trend of environmental degradation, the government closed more than 40 paper mills and goldmines this year for emitting excessive pollution.

"At the same time, there should be new breakthroughs when drawing new laws, regulations and standards," said Xie.

(Xinhua News Agency June 30, 2005)