While 86 percent of Chinese think environmental pollution has
had a negative impact on their health, a national report released
Monday showed that most of them are apathetic about environmental
protection.
The annual national report on environmental awareness, released
by the State Environmental Protection Administration, surveyed
4,482 residents from 28 cities nationwide.
The report comes amid mounting concern about the environmental
cost of China's breakneck economic growth.
"Chinese people are dissatisfied with the state of the
environment but they seldom take part in environmental protection
activities," said the report, adding that food safety, drinking
water and air pollution are the environmental issues that worry
people most.
More than 10 percent of metropolitan residents and 7.5 percent
of rural dwellers think their living environment is "unfit for
habitation". Both urban and rural residents are unsatisfied about
garbage treatment, and 52 percent rural respondents consider
garbage disposal "a big problem".
About 61 percent of the people surveyed said the Chinese
government "pays a lot of attention" to environmental protection
and 70 percent applauded the government's "environmental impact
evaluation" carried out before each industrial or construction
project.
But the survey failed to ask responders about how to resolve the
Chinese dilemmas: how to reconcile the desire to limit the
environmental cost of growth with the need to keep the economy
humming in order to provide jobs, and how to wean local officials
away from their growth-at-all-costs attitudes.
Local environmental departments received about 600,000 pollution
reports from the public in 2006, up 30 percent over 2005. But 76
percent of responders did not know the national environmental
protection hotline number "12369".
(Xinhua News Agency January 18, 2007)
