The Ministry of Land and Resources is expected to issue measures on land reclamation in mining areas and has finished collecting public feedback.

China promulgated the Land Restoration Regulation in February 2011. The country's 1,500-plus mining areas occupy about 2 million hectares of land, and the figure is expanding by 33,000 to 47,000 hectares annually, according to ministry statistics.

The land reclamation rate is merely 15 percent, far below the international level, which mainly stands at around 50 to 70 percent.

Land destroyed near coal mines makes up about 80 percent of the total ruined by all kinds of mining. Thus, future efforts will mainly focus on coal mine areas, said Hu Zhenqi, Secretary General of the Land Reclamation and Ecological Restoration Committee of the China Coal Society.