(7) Environmental rights

China will strengthen its environmental protection work to guarantee the public's environmental rights, focusing on serious environmental pollution affecting the people's life, like heavy metal pollution, drinking water pollution, and air, soil and marine contamination.

- Amending the Law on Environmental Protection, preserving and improving the living environment and ecosystem, and preventing and controlling environmental pollution and other hazards.

- Effectively preventing and controlling heavy metal pollution by improving the prevention and control system, emergency response system, and environment and health risk assessment system as regards heavy metal pollution.

- Strengthening water pollution prevention and reversal efforts. China will improve the water quality and environment in trans-provincial areas, tackle seriously contaminated urban water systems and tributary rivers, slow the eutrophication of major lakes, further increase the rate of water functional zones that reach the required hygiene standards, and gradually restore the water ecosystem in certain water areas. China will also enhance protection of unpolluted lakes, and continuously reduce the total emission of major pollutants that contaminate the water. An underground water monitoring and control system will be established; the underground water pollution will be measured; underground water pollution sources will be initially controlled; and experiments to reverse underground water pollution will be launched.

- Improving air quality. By 2015, the country's chemical oxygen demand amount will be controlled at 23.476 million tons, and the total emissions of sulfur dioxide, ammonia nitrogen and nitric oxides will be controlled at 20.864 million tons, 2.38 million tons and 20.462 million tons, respectively. China will endeavor to reduce the concentration of inhalable particulate matter in the air in key regions year by year. By 2015, all cities at prefecture level and above will monitor particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers.

- Pushing forward ecosystem construction. By 2015, China's land nature reserves will take up 15% of its total land area so that 90% of the key species under national protection and typical ecosystem types will be preserved. China's forest coverage will reach 21.66%. Ten million ha of desertified land and 200,000 sq km of land suffering from soil erosion will be treated. In urban and rural built-up areas, the vegetation-coverage rates will reach 39% and 25%, respectively.

- Strengthening marine ecosystem protection, pushing forward the construction of marine conservation areas, and tightening supervision for the environmental effects of marine projects and waste discharge into the sea.

- Intensifying prevention and control of radioactive waste pollution. China will push forward the decommissioning of obsolete nuclear facilities, and the prevention and treatment of radioactive waste. Civil radioactive-irradiation facilities will be decommissioned, and the waste will be reclaimed. The country will strengthen its ability to store, treat and dispose of radioactive waste, and basically eliminate the danger of contamination by low- and intermediate-level radioactive residue waste left over from history. The treatment of pollution by uranium mines and mines associated with radioactivity will be accelerated, and uranium mining and refining facilities that fall short of safety requirements will be shut down. At the same time, a long-term monitoring mechanism will be established for decommissioned uranium mining and refining facilities.

- Enforcing strict monitoring and control over dangerous chemicals. China will phase out chemicals that are highly poisonous, hard to degrade or highly hazardous to the environment, and strictly restrict the production and use of chemicals involving severe environmental risks.

- Improving environmental monitoring and supervision mechanisms, establishing a trans-regional and inter-departmental cooperative mechanism for the enforcement of environmental laws, and improving the accountability system for major environmental and pollution accidents.