Future growth to be tied to resource care
(China Daily)
Updated: 2004-06-24 23:58
A new green GDP mechanism may turn "a new page in Chinese environmental
history."
Officials and experts are working on an accounting system to adjust gross
domestic product (GDP) calculations to include environmental costs.
Dubbed "green GDP,'' the new accounting system is a joint effort by the State
Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) and the National Bureau of
Statistics (NBS).
Officials designed a four-step approach to calculate green GDP, officials
said Thursday during an international workshop sponsored by Environmental
Defence, a US-based environmental NGO.
The workshop marks "a new page in Chinese environmental history," said Dan
Dudek, Environmental Defence's chief economist.
Green GDP includes integrated environmental and economic accounting systems
and attempts to measure the actual amount of environmental pollution.
The system also attempts to account for the cost of environmental losses and
adjust GDP calculations to match those losses.
The system is needed to support a sustainable economy, said NBS director Li
Deshui.
Although development of the system itself is still in its preliminary stages,
ministries should work together to develop it, he said.
Pan Yue, deputy director of SEPA, said the new system fine tunes the existing
national economic accounting system, because it does not factor in natural
resource depletion and environmental losses.
Green GDP can also be used to evaluate the performance of local government
officials, who are used to being promoted solely based on their successes in
advancing the local economy.
Pan said one of the objectives of the green GDP calculation is to bring
ecological and environmental concerns into officials' decision-making
process.
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