Mr. Jining Chen represented the Ministry of Environmental Protection of PRC to welcome President Bollinger’s visit and briefly introduced the environmental protection situation in China. He said that the Chinese government always took the work on environmental protection seriously and exerted itself to solve the conflicts between economic development and environmental protection. The Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) has put forward the five major notions of development—innovation, coordination, greenness, openness and sharing and proposed an array of significant deployments on ecological civilization building and environmental protection. In recent years, China has commenced its action plan on air and water pollution prevention and management and reinforced the environmental law enforcement. It has also driven the reformation of industry structure and energy structure and prompted the emission reduction of major pollutants. All the efforts have produced positive effects. However, it is such a long-term, arduous, and complicated process to solve the environmental issues in China that scientific decision-making and technological support is highly needed.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection of PRC is willing to develop collaborations with the research institutes, think tanks, and university-wide entities at Columbia University to take advantage of the scientific and technological strengths of the University to solve the environmental issues in China and thus contribute to the continuous advancement of the collaborations on environmental protection between China and the U.S.
President Bollinger expressed his appreciation for China’s efforts and achievements in environmental protection and his willingness to actively develop collaborations with China to mutually promote the sustainable development of the environment in China and worldwide.
(This news was covered by China Environment News and republished on the websites of several major environment-related agencies in China including the Ministry of Environmental Protection of the People’s Republic of China.)