The CCTV headquarters is shrouded in heavy smog in the central business district in Beijing, China Dec 7, 2015.[Photo/Xinhua]

The quality of development rather than just the quantity will be given priority by the nation's top economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, a spokesperson recently announced.

In the past, both the central and local governments have vowed to reduce the weight given to the growth of gross domestic product in officials' performance evaluations and give more importance to the environmental protection efforts they have made. However, no satisfactory results have been achieved.

For example, some officials in Zhengzhou, capital of Central China's Henan province, were recently appraised as excellent even though the city's environmental protection was assessed as poor. The reason is that in the performance evaluations of Zhengzhou's officials, environmental protection accounts for only 16 percent, while economic development accounts for 50 percent.

And this is not just the case in Zhengzhou, the performance evaluations of officials in other regions are also dominated by the local economic development, and there is no motivation for them to increase their environmental protection efforts, given GDP produces local fiscal revenues and creates jobs.

The recent promulgation of a series of documents increasing the weight of environmental protection efforts in the performance evaluations of local officials means GDP growth will account for about 10 percent of an official's performance evaluation, much smaller than that of resource utilization, and environmental and ecological protection. Such a new index system, if effectively implemented, will fundamentally change the current GDP-dominated performance perspective of local officials.

Past experience, however, shows that difficulties in the push for greener, more sustainable development usually lie in the implementation level. So, whether there will be any substantial effects from the change remains to be seen.

To make officials serious about protecting the local environment, the authorities should further intensify the accountability mechanism and hold zero tolerance toward the falsifying of pollution data. More efforts should also be made to promote public supervision.

--Beijing News