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SOCIETY
Weekly Watch> SOCIETY
UPDATED: March 18, 2015 NO. 12 MARCH 19, 2015
Society
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GREEN SPRING: Volunteers plant trees at Siyuan Experimental School in Chongqing on March 11 for the Tree Planting Day, which fell on March 12. More than 300 volunteers planted over 1,000 trees on the day (CHEN CHENG)

Forest Coverage

Forest coverage in Beijing was 41 percent by the end of last year, authorities revealed on March 11.

According to the Beijing Greening Committee, a total of 197 million trees have been planted in the capital city following an ordinance on tree planting in 1981. Nearly 88 percent of those trees have survived.

Over the past 34 years, more than 86 million people have been involved in tree-planting campaigns.

By the end of 2014, nearly 47.4 percent of Beijing had foliage, with public green space per capita reaching 15.9 square meters, it said.

Forestation over the years has helped reduce sandstorms in Beijing, but the city is still under pressure to improve its air quality.

Offshore Water Pollution

The majority of China's offshore sea areas are under threat from pollution, a report from the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) has indicated.

Of the areas monitored by the SOA in the summer of 2014, 81 percent, or 41,000 square km, was polluted. It said most of the polluted water was concentrated in river estuaries or bays. The main pollutants are inorganic nitrogen, reactive phosphate and oil.

The situation has only slightly improved from the previous year, when the SOA recorded 44,340 square km of polluted sea water.

The report said nearly half of the 445 major pollution discharge points along coastlines failed environmental requirements, greatly compromising water quality.

Marine disasters such as red tides and green algae also impacted larger sea areas in 2014 than in 2013, according to the report.

Judicial Auctions Online

Nearly 700 courts in 21 provincial areas registered accounts on sf.taobao.com, the nation's largest online site for judicial auctions, as of February. So far nearly 90,000 auctions have been finished, figures from the site show.

In November 2014, an auction of real estate properties seized by a court in east China's Jiangsu Province set the sf.taobao.com price record after reaching 350 million yuan ($55.88 million).

In July 2012, a BMW sedan was sold on Taobao.com after being seized in a lawsuit by the Beilun District People's Court in Ningbo, east China's Zhejiang Province. It marked the country's first judicial auction to take place on a third-party commercial website without an agent.

So far, all courts in Beijing and Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Henan, Fujian, and Guizhou provinces have opened accounts on Taobao.com and pilot auctions have been launched for courts in 15 other provinces, including Guangdong, Yunnan and Sichuan.

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