China raises alarm over Yangtze environmental damage
Beijing (AFP) Aug 31, 2010 – China will spend billions of dollars treating sewage and planting forests to arrest massive environmental degradation along the Yangtze river and its Three Gorges reservoir, officials said Tuesday. “Generally speaking, the ecological state (of the river) is still far from what the Communist Party and people are demanding,” forestry minister Jia Zhibang told journalists. “For numerous reasons, the forests on both sides of the river have been seriously degraded, leading to bare mountains and hills that have led to repeated natural disasters” such as landslides. The new plans call for an increase in forest coverage along the 600-kilometre-long (370-mile-long) reservoir to 65 percent from the current 22 percent, Chongqing city mayor Huang Qifan said at the same news briefing. More than 10 billion yuan (1.5 billion dollars) will be invested in the forestry campaign. … Recent torrential rains have once again spotlighted the environmental problems, with massive quantities of trash and other debris washed into the river, threatening to jam up the Three Gorges Dam, state media have reported. The garbage was so thick in places that people could walk across it, the China Daily newspaper said. To help curb worsening water pollution, Chongqing, which has invested 50 billion yuan on sewage treatment facilities in recent years, will invest another 28 billion yuan in the coming three years, Huang said.
