[gmw.cn]Shi Minjun: Green Development is the Fundamental Policy for the Construction of Ecological Civilization in the New Era

Author’s Note: Green development is not just a train of thought. It is also a way out. It requires more than just a heartbeat but also requires action. We must unswervingly take the road of giving priority to ecological development and green development, and clarify the key tasks in different stages in accordance with the road map for the construction of ecological civilization. The current focus is on restructuring the economic structure and energy structure, optimizing the layout of the country’s space development, nurturing and expanding energy-saving and environmental protection industries, cleaner production industries, and clean energy industries, promoting comprehensive resource conservation and recycling, and constraining the environment to force industrial restructuring; in the meantime, it will promote the development of high quality and achieve the decoupling of economic growth from resource and environmental loads and improve sustainability. At the same time, we must timely promote the reform of the ecological civilization system, deepen the innovation of institutional mechanisms for the construction of ecological civilization, and build an ecological civilized institutional system that guarantees the modernization of governance systems and governance capabilities, providing sustainable development to productive forces and green ecological benefits, using institutional guarantees to promote more cities and regions to achieve the unification of beautiful scenery and the gold and silver mines. It is necessary to grasp well the landing of reform measures that have already been issued and to formulate new reform plans in a timely manner. Make full use of market methods, improve resource and environmental price mechanism, promote policy innovation in the internalization of external environmental costs, implement a green certification system, and make green and ecology an integral part of value-adding; synergistic use of government-led and enterprise-dominant roles to improve multiple environmental protection Input mechanism, adopting various ways to support government and social capital cooperation projects, guiding social capital into the green development field, realizing circular links of production systems and living systems, advocating simple and moderate, green and low-carbon lifestyles, encouraging green consumption, and promoting green development and the full formation of ways and lifestyles.

The construction of ecological civilization is in the critical period and window period, requires hard work

Xi Jinping pointed out that, on the whole, the quality of China's ecological environment has continued to improve, and there has been a steady trend, but the effect is not stable. Ecological civilization construction is in the critical period of pressure superposition and load-bearing. It has entered the period of providing more high-quality ecological products to meet the people's growing beautiful ecological environment, and also reached the conditions to have the ability to solve outstanding problems in the ecological environment. The research report of "Green Road--China's Economic Green Development 2018" released by the National Academy of Development and Strategy of Renmin University of China in April 2018 pointed out that China's green development is unbalanced, and economic development and sustainability are not coordinated. About 20% cities and provinces faced the serious problems of serious imbalance between the economic development and sustainability and the challenges of degradation of environmental quality and declining sustainability. That ecological civilization construction is in a critical period can be said that the party and the country have made a major judgment on the current stage of development based on the scientific understanding of China’s national conditions, and also promoted the ecology for the new era.

Standing on the new historical starting point, a new journey of ecological civilization construction will soon begin. Xi Jinping stressed that we must speed up the construction of an ecological civilization system and ensure that the quality of the ecological environment will be fundamentally improved by 2035 and that the beautiful China goal will be basically achieved. By the middle of the century, material civilization, political civilization, spiritual civilization, social civilization, and ecological civilization have risen in an all-round manner. Green development methods and lifestyles have been formed in an all-round manner. People and nature have been born in harmony, and the state governance system and modernization capabilities in the ecological environment have been fully realized. In the end, beautiful China was built. This is the goal for the new journey to beautiful China, and it also sets a specific timetable for the promotion of ecological civilization in the new era.

Promoting Green Development in an All-round Way Is the Ultimate Approach to the Construction of Ecological Civilization

In the new journey towards building beautiful China, promoting green development in an all-round way is the ultimate solution to the construction of ecological civilization. Xi Jinping pointed out that green development is an indispensable requirement for building a high-quality modern economic system and is a fundamental policy for solving pollution problems. The so-called green development is to achieve the decoupling of economic growth from resource and environmental load, that is, economic growth will not cause an increase in resource and environmental load, solve ecological environmental problems well, and improve sustainability; second, make sustainability become productivity, makes green and ecologically profitable, ecological advantages can be turned into economic advantages, and green mountains and green mountains become gold and silver mines. The path to achieve green development is industrial ecologization and ecological industrialization, establishing a green economy system. The "Green Road-China Economic Development 2018" research report pointed out that most provinces have not yet achieved the decoupling of economic growth from resource and environmental load, and they still do not achieve the internal unity of green hills and gold mines. It can be seen from this that it is still a long way for the new era to fully promote green development.