Hu made the remarks at the Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change, which gathered leaders from Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea and the Group of Eight (G8) nations at Toyako, a resort town on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

China is among the countries seriously affected by the negative impacts of climate change, he said in a speech at the meeting.

“When looking at China’s emissions, it is necessary to take into account the following three factors,” Hu said.

“First, China is a developing country in the process of industrialization and modernization,” said the Chinese president.

The country faces imbalances in terms of development between urban and rural areas, among different regions, and between the economic sector and the social sector, and people’s living standards are still not high, he said.

China’s central task now is to develop the economy and make life better for the people, Hu added.

“Second, China’s per capita emissions are relatively low, and are even lower if calculated in accumulative terms,” he said.

The Chinese leader said a significant share of China’s total emissions fall in the category of subsistence emissions necessary to meet people’s basic needs.

“Third, as a result of changes in international division of labor and manufacturing relocation, China faces mounting pressure of international transferred emissions,” he said.

He said the Chinese government, with a responsible attitude toward the Chinese people and people of the whole world, takes climate change very seriously.

“We have made it a strategic task to build a conservation culture and we adhere to the basic state policy of conserving resources and protecting the environment,” Hu said.

China is making efforts to ensure that its industrial structure, growth model and consumption pattern are energy and resource efficient and environmentally-friendly, he said.

“We have, in line with our economic and social development plans and sustainable development strategy, formulated China’s National Climate Change Program, set up the National Leading Group to Address Climate Change, promulgated a series of laws and regulations and adopted a host of measures to tackle climate change,” said the Chinese president.

China, which started efforts by saving energy and cutting emissions, has taken a series of measures, including conserving energy, improving the energy mix, raising energy efficiency and promoting afforestation, and has achieved noticeable results, he said.

“We have set the clear targets that the year-end energy intensity per unit of GDP of 2005 will be reduced by 20 percent by2010, total discharge of major pollutants will be cut by 10 percent and forest coverage will increase to 20 percent from the 2005 figure of 18.2 percent,” Hu said, adding that China is firmly committed to meeting these targets.

He said that to adapt to climate change, China has made continued efforts to strengthen adaptation capacities in the fields of agriculture, natural and ecological systems and water resources.

“We place great importance on disaster prevention and reduction and minimizing the losses caused by disastrous weather conditions and extreme climate events,” said the Chinese president.

Hu pointed out that China will, in accordance with the requirements of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its Kyoto Protocol and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, actively promote negotiations on the implementation of the Bali Road Map and make a greater contribution to international cooperation on climate change.

“China is ready to work unremittingly with the rest of the international community to achieve harmonious, clean and sustainable development in the world,” he said.

ShareThis

The traditional industry structure remained unchanged, while the service sector and high-tech manufacturing weighting fell in the national economy, State Councilors heard at a meeting focusing on energy saving and emission reduction, chaired by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

Meeting the energy saving and emission reduction targets set in the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010) remained an arduous task, they agreed.

With performances in conserving energy and reducing pollutant emissions introduced into administrative evaluation, those who fail to meet the goals are to be put under public scrutiny.

Industries with high energy consumption and pollution should be resolutely curbed, and the land use, energy consumption and environment impact assessment should be considered in approving new projects, the State Council warned.

This year should see the closure of small thermal power plants with a generation capacity of 13 million kilowatts. Outdated production capacity in cement, aluminum electrolysis, paper-making, iron and steel industries should be eliminated.

The Chinese government will fund key environment protection projects, including the construction of the sewage treatment facility network.

Environment-friendly construction materials should make up more than 80 percent of projects by the end of 2008.

China reported a drop in both sulfur dioxide emissions and carbon oxygen demand, a measure of water pollution, in 2007.

Last year, China saw a 3.27 percent year-on-year drop in energy consumption for each 10,000 yuan of GDP, Premier Wen Jiabao said in his government work report to the First Session of the 11th National People’s Congress.

However, the Chinese government has admitted the difficulty of hitting the targets to cut China’s total energy consumption by about 20 percent and emissions of major pollutants by 10 percent by the year 2010, a goal the government set in 2006.

ShareThis

Autodesk has acquired substantially all the assets related to the Ecotect software tools for conceptual building performance analysis from both Square One Research Ltd. and Dr. Andrew Marsh.

Autodesk also announced that it has completed the acquisition of substantially all the assets of Green Building Studio, Inc., a provider of web-based whole building energy, water and carbon-emission analysis software.

Buildings are a leading contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, so to combat climate change it is critical for the building industry to rapidly adopt sustainable design practices that will lead to buildings which are appreciably more efficient and eventually carbon neutral, said Jay Bhatt, senior vice president, Autodesk AEC solutions. The addition of these tools to our technology portfolio will help make it easier for architects, engineers and designers to understand the impact of their design decisions on building performance earlier in the design process so they can optimize for reduced environmental impact.

The acquisitions of Ecotect and the Green Building Studio assets will support Autodesk’s vision to deliver software that enables architects and engineers to design more sustainable projects. With improved building performance analysis capabilities, Autodesk will be uniquely positioned to offer a comprehensive suite of software solutions for sustainable design and analysis, enabling a BIM process that can facilitate cost-effective design and delivery of high-performing, resource-efficient buildings and infrastructure.

Square One Research, Ltd. and Dr. Andrew Marsh, creator of the Ecotect environmental design and analysis tools, are based in Isle of Man. The Ecotect tools can measure how fundamental criteria, such as solar, thermal, shading, lighting, and airflow, will affect building performance in the conceptual and detailed phases of design. Their capability to forecast building performance over time better equips architects and engineers to deliver more energy efficient and sustainable building designs.

Square One Research and Autodesk share a commitment to using technology to make the design and construction of sustainable, high-performance buildings easier and more efficient, said Dr. Andrew J. Marsh, Co-Founder and Head of Research & Development, Square One Research. We are pleased to join Autodesk and look forward to helping develop and deliver simple and effective building performance analysis to architects and engineers around the world.

The Autodesk Green Building Studio analysis tools provide improved design insight through whole building energy, water and carbon-emission analysis, helping architects and designers to maximize building economic and environmental performance. The tools are compatible with Autodesk design software as well as software from other industry providers through the Green Building XML (gbXML) schema and can now be directly accessed from within the Revit platform for BIM with a new plug-in now available for download.

ShareThis

The report, released by leading human-resources service provider Zhaopin.com in Shanghai, was based on a survey of more than 1,000 companies across all sectors throughout the country last year.

It found workers in the financial industry were paid an average salary of 4,987 yuan (US$694) per month. The figure is about 40 percent higher than the national average.

“The stock market in the Chinese mainland had undergone deeper reform and it remained hot last year. That contributed to the salary rises in the financial sector,” said Liu Hao, Zhaopin’s CEO.

Liu said it was not unusual to see fund managers and analysts earning more than one million yuan a year.

The high-tech sector ranked second on the list. Average income in the information technology industry also reached 4,282 yuan (around 600 US dollars) por month last year, the report said. As comparison, the average salary of a software engineer in San Francisco — California — goes around 9700 US dollars a month.

“Leading enterprises like electronic commerce and the online gaming industry drove the whole industry towards fast growth,” Liu said, adding that more than half of the enterprises used long-term incentive salary policies.

Third on the list was the real-estate industry, where salaries jumped by 15 percent on average to 4,051 yuan (around 570 US dollars) per month last year.

Zhaopin analysts said that industry growth in second-tier cities such as Tianjin, Dalian, Shenyang, Changsha and Wuhan largely contributed to the rise in average wages.

Also high on the earnings list were employees in the media and public relations, motoring, consumer goods, medicine, energy, and the chemical and manufacturing industries.

The report also revealed that new college graduates were paid 2,169 yuan (around 300 US dollars) per month on average in major Chinese cities. Masters degree graduates were paid on average 2,853 yuan (a little over 400 US dollars) per month and PhD graduates earned 3,878 (around 540 US dollars) yuan por month.

ShareThis

Weather conditions in southern China will remain severe and relief work difficult, Chinese leaders warned yesterday as the country battles with the worst snowfalls in decades.

The warning came after a meeting chaired by Chinese President Hu Jintao to study the relief effort.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has just concluded his second visit in a week to central Hunan Province, the region worst hit.

Wen’s last stop, Chenzhou City, is still suffering power failures and a lack of running water.

Visiting homes of local residents who have had no water and electricity for 10 days, Wen said: “Please be patient. The situation will be better in a few days as the government is going all out to help you.”

A statement issued after the meeting said: “We have to be clear minded that certain regions in the south will continue to undergo icy weather caused by rain and snow and severe disasters will continue.”

“Relief work will remain very grim, posing a tough task on us,” it added. The statement noted that it remained a priority for the government to restore transport and power supplies and guarantee people’s daily needs.

The meeting urged local officials to make relief work a priority even though the transport and power supply problems in some disaster-hit regions have eased. The transportation authority will concentrate on helping stranded people on their way home, and the delivery of relief materials, daily necessities and coal to power plants.

China is facing its worst energy shortage in many years, with heightened demand caused by the intense cold and the snow, and insufficient coal supplies unable to keep up. After an energy shortage that has struck at least 13 provinces and reached about 70 gigawatts, approximately equal to the entire capacity of Great Britain, the government has ordered that coal be supplied first of all to the power plants.

Governments of all levels are told to crack down upon overcharging, especially on daily commodities such as rice, meat and cooking oil.

Chinese army sent out military vehicles, from tanks to armored cars, to clean the highways while the air force’s helicopters and transporters lifted relief material such as candles and quilts to several heavily-affected regions.

Some private companies yesterday donated more than 10 million yuan (US$1.36 million) to victims in affected areas.

And 65,000 medical workers are serving victims in the fields, according to the Ministry of Health.

ShareThis

1. Property
The National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature, passed the Property Law of the People’s Republic of China on March 16. The law granted equal protection to public and private properties for the first time.

2. Labor
On June 29, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress passed the Labor Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China. The law requires employers to provide written contracts to their workers, restricts the use of temporary laborers and helps give more employees long-term job security. The Employment Promotion Law was issued on August 30 and will take effect on January 1, 2008. Under the law, an employer may find itself in court if it discriminates against a job applicant on the basis of sex, age, religion, race or physical disability.

3. Healthcare/Social Assistance
A series of measures were taken to solve problems concerning the well-being of citizens. On July 10, the State Council issued the guidelines to set up a pilot program to provide basic medical insurance to all urban residents. The program first came into effect in September and covered 79 cities from different provinces. The program aims to create a comprehensive health insurance system to solve medical care problems for children, the elderly, the disabled, low-income earners and the unemployed. On August 13, the State Council issued a policy framework for establishing a low-rent housing system for low-income urban families. The State Council required all cities to provide affordable housing for low-income families across the nation.

4. Sovereign fund
China established its own sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment Corp (CIC), on September 29. The fund was created to invest a portion of its $1.4 trillion in currency reserves to seek better financial returns. CIC has $200 billion to invest, including one-third of that, or about $67 billion, earmarked for overseas investments. The rest will go to investments inside China.

5. Party congress
The 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China set up a new target for the nation’s future economic and social development. The Party congress, held from October 15 to 21, set up the goal to build a moderately prosperous society in all respects. The per capita gross domestic product in 2020 should double that of 2000.

6. Stock market
The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index surpassed 6000 points and fluctuated dramatically. The Shanghai Composite Index soared to 6123 points on October 16 from below 3000 points at the beginning of the year. The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges now have more than 130 million stock accounts.

7. Lunar probe
Chang’e I, China’s first lunar orbiter, was launched on October 24, marking a new milestone in China’s aerospace history.

8. Environment
Energy-saving and emissions reduction were added to the key indicators for evaluating the performance of government officials. For the first three quarters of the year, China’s energy intensity, or the amount of energy needed to produce a unit of GDP, declined 3 percent. China’s carbon dioxide and chemical oxygen demand emissions also declined for the first time.

9. Monetary policy
China adopted a “tight” monetary policy for the first time in 10 years. China’s consumer price index, the barometer for inflation, rose to 6.9 percent, a record high in recent years. Facing mounting inflationary pressure, the Central Economic Work Conference listed “preventing the rapidly expanding economy from overheating and structural price rises from evolving into entrenched inflation” as the top priorities for macro control. The government also shifted its monetary policy stance from “prudent” to “tight”.

10. Public holidays
The government scrapped one of the country’s three Golden Week holidays and introduced three new one-day public holidays. The new national public holiday plan adds three traditional festivals - Tomb-Sweeping Day, the Dragon Boat Festival and the Mid-Autumn Festival - to the public holiday list.

ShareThis

1- China’s top legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), adopted a landmark property law on March 16, granting equal protection to public and private properties.

2- Serious pollution caused a sudden stenchy algae outbreak in China’s third largest freshwater lake Taihu in late May, cutting tap water supply to more than one million residents in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province.

3- China issued the National Climate Change Program, the first national plan to address climate change by a developing country, on June 4, pledging to restructure its economy, promote clean technologies and improve energy efficiency, demonstrating its determination to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an all-round way.

4- China’s State Council, or the cabinet, issued a circular on July 11 to introduce a system of minimum living allowance in all rural areas in the country, benefiting more than 20 million rural poor.

5- China marks the 80th founding anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army on August 1 in Beijing, with President Hu Jintao delivering an important speech.

6- The Communist Party of China convened its 17th National Congress in mid October, charting a roadmap for the country’s development in the future years, enshrining the Scientific Outlook on Development into the Party Constitution and electing a new central leadership of the Party.

7- China successfully launched its first lunar probe, Chang’e-1,on October 24, which entered the moon orbit 15 days later and transmitted back lunar images, marking a third milestone of the country’s space programs after the earth satellite and the manned space missions.

8- The Chinese government on Dec. 16 officially announced a new holiday plan, scrapping one of the three “golden week” holidays and added three traditional festivals — Tomb-Sweeping Day, Dragon-boat Festival and Mid Autumn Festival — to the list of public holidays.

9- China’s grain output, which includes rice, wheat, corn and soybean, exceeded 500 million tons in 2007, making it the fourth consecutive year of output increase since 2004; the harvest has been expected to be a bumper grain output that can help slow price rises of the year. Rises in food prices lifted the nation’s consumer price index (CPI) to an 11-year high of 6.9 percent in November.

10- The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature, on Dec. 29 adopted a decision on Hong Kong’s constitutional development, allowing appropriate amendments to the method for selecting the fourth Chief Executive and forming the fifth term Legislative Council of the special administrative region in the year 2012; the Standing Committee also decided that the election of the fifth Chief Executive in 2017 may be implemented through universal suffrage.

ShareThis

More than 6,000 science, technology workers, as well as scientist-turned-entrepreneurs on met recently to discuss issues such as energy saving and environmental protection. Among them were more than 100 members from Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), the highest palaces for scientific research achievements and engineering progress.

While addressing opening of the annual conference of China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) in Wuhan, the most important industrial city in central China, CAST Chairman Han Qide said resource and environmental factors had become two prominent problems hampering social and economic development in China.

For a period of time ahead, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology will make active, dedicated efforts with other related government departments to press ahead with work in several major fields, so as to provide a strong, technical prop for energy saving and emission reduction in the country.

Arcaic and polluting industries will receive stricts guidelines toward energy savings: China recently published the nation’s first energy-saving standards for cement manufacturing plants to further increase the industry’s energy efficiency.

Published by the Ministry of Construction, the standards covered every aspect of cement manufacturing, including plant construction, manufacturing technology, power systems and equipment use. Some articles are compulsory.

The standards are a part of the End-Use Energy Efficiency Program of the Chinese government, run in cooperation with the United Nations Development Program. The project aims to dramatically improve the efficiency of China’s major energy users: commercial and residential buildings, and heavy industries, such as iron, steel, cement and petrochemicals.

“By using the new standards, cement plants can reduce energy use by about 15 percent,” Vice-Chairman of the China Cement Association Zeng Xuemin said

The development of rural China is also pressing the energy consumption. In 2006, energy consumption in China’s rural areas amounted to about 900 million tons of standard coal, or one quarter of the total commodity energy consumption in the country, so the task for energy conservation and emission reduction in the Chinese countryside is very grave. At present, the rural areas in China yield more than 4 billion tons of farm throwaways, including 2.6 billion tons of human and livestock excrement and some 700 million tons of straw each year.

This means a big source of pollution as well as a great resource of biological materials. So it is imperative for China to step up its effort to develop biogas and other new rural energy sources by making an all-round use of rural throwaways with advanced cycle economy technologies.

Urbanization is another challenge. By 2020, with its urban population expected to exceed 900 million, China will have to handle the demands of its cities and all varieties of emissions in the country are very great. So, the country should acquire as fast as it can the advanced, appropriate technical-how in such major spheres as urban development and building materials, the all-round use of urban wastes, garbage power generation, public transport and communication, and car exhaust, and the establishment of urban monitoring networks for energy saving and emission reduction should be hastened.

ShareThis

Since the beginning of its economical opening — when the first 5-year plans were devised in 1979 — China has being growing at an incredible speed, with its GNP numbers jumping from 44 billion dollars to 1.6 trillion dollars in just 20 years.

Such growth has pushed the Chinese manufacturing industry into devouring huge amounts of natural resources in a alarming way: in 2004, China — the 8th largest economy in GNP scale — consumed 8% of all the oil, 31% of all the coal, 10% of all the electricity, 30% of all ore, 30% of all steel, 19% of all aluminum, 20% of all the copper and 40% of all cement produced in the world.

Adding such demand for natural resources to low efficiency means of production (the power-generation, steel and chemical industry in China spends 40% more energy in comparison to developed countries) and we get one of the most polluting countries in the planet: according to the World Bank, 6 out of the 10 the most polluted cities in the planet are in China.

Worries about the quality of life of its people — as well as with its the capacity of continuing to grow in a sustainable way — has recently lead the Chinese Central Government to changing its development macro-strategy for the next five years: new initiatives (both state-run and private) of development zones/projects will emphasize on environmental and sustainability issues. Sectors such as Information Technology, financial and tourism will be stimulated, and special incentives will be given to create investments on technological innovation.

ShareThis