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.

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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.

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Heavy white storms staged a comeback late yesterday as China’s transport network remained crippled by the heaviest snowfall in five decades.

Millions of people trying to head home for the Spring Festival are stranded.

The big freeze has killed dozens of people, impacted on the lives of at least 80 million others and caused economic losses estimated at more than 53.8 billion yuan (US$7.5 billion).

Snow began to hit central Hunan Province and eastern Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang provinces yesterday afternoon.

The national meteorological center forecast red-alert-level snowstorms in the northern and central parts of Zhejiang today.

Sleet is today set to hit major parts of Guizhou Province, and southern regions of Hunan and central Jiangxi - three areas where icy weather has seriously disrupted power supplies. Fujian Province in the east can also expect sleet, weather experts said.

Premier Wen Jiabao yesterday made a second trip to Changsha, capital of Hunan, within a week to help direct emergency work. Wen visited railways in Changsha and Guangzhou on Monday and Wednesday in an effort to calm stranded passengers. After several days of respite from the heavy snow, traffic along the expressway linking Beijing and Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, began to pick up speed after ice was removed.

More and more trains also resumed operations on the Beijing-Guangzhou railway. The north-south trunk line had been paralyzed since last Saturday from the Hunan section southward where power-transmission facilities were knocked out by heavy snow.

Guangzhou, home to millions of migrant workers seeking to go home for the holidays, has been the worst affected.

The number of stranded people in Guangzhou yesterday dropped to 400,000 from a peak of 800,000.

The cold weather is China’s worst since 1954.

Between January 25 and Thursday, a total of 5.8 million passengers were stranded throughout the railway system, said Zhao Chunlei, deputy director of the Regulation Department of the Ministry of Railways.

So far at least 60 people have been killed and nearly 1.76 million have been relocated.

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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.

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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.

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