Strengthening Management of Environmental Problems Affecting Health

Abstract

The CPC central committee and the State Council have attached great importance to environmental protection by putting it in the main position and making it the main force of ecological civilization construction and the core content of building a beautiful China, realizing a sustainable development, introducing an overall plan for the reform of the ecological civilization system, implementing the action plan for the prevention and control of air, water and soil pollution, and vigorously strengthening environment and health work. In 2015, the average annual concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in 338 prefecture-level and above cities was 50 μg/m3; the proportion of the 1940 state-controlled sections of class I–III surface water increased to 66%; the proportion of worse V fell to 9.7%; the quality of the main streams in major rivers was obviously improved. The capacities of national desulfurization and denitrification units, accounting for the total installed capacity of coal power, increased to 99% and 92% respectively, which completed the ultra-low emission transformation of 160 million kilowatts of coal-fired power units. The comprehensive environment improvement in 72,000 villages has been implemented, directly benefiting more than 120 million rural people. A number of major ecological conservation and rehabilitation projects have been carried out steadily, including natural forest protection, returning farmland into forest and grass, and grazing land into grassland, shelter forest system construction, protection and restoration of lakes and wetlands, desertification control, water and soil conservation, desertification management, wildlife protection and nature reserve construction. Pollutant emissions of the five heavy metals of lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and arsenic have fallen 27.7% since 2007, and the number of sudden environment incidents involving heavy metals has been greatly reduced. In order to solve the environmental problems that harm people’s health, the Environment Protection Law and the series of environmental management documents clearly put forward the requirements for strengthening environment and health management, which provide legal and policy basis for the establishment and the improvement of environment and health management systems, organization and the implementation of environment and health surveys, monitoring and risk assessment.