German Ambassador to China Michael Clauss. (Photo: GT/Chen Yang)
There is a lot of potential for China and Germany to cooperate in the environmental industry, as the two countries both strive to achieve a balance between maintaining industrial-led growth and protecting the environment, German Ambassador to China Michael Clauss said on Tuesday.
"There is a similarity in industrial pollution in Germany's Ruhr industrial area and [North China's] Hebei Province," Clauss told reporters on the sidelines of a Sino-Germany environmental conference held in Beijing.
In the 1960s, Germany's Ruhr industrial area struggled with serious pollution from steel mills and coal miners, according to Clauss. Hebei, which produces at least one-fifth of the country's steel, has been blamed for causing air pollution in China's northern cities such as Beijing and Tianjin.
"China and Germany are both major industrial powers, and are not likely to tackle pollution by deindustrialization, so maintaining the economic growth while developing the environmental protection industry is a more suitable path for the two," Clauss said.
China has strengthened environmental protection by rolling out three action plans on tackling air, soil and water pollution, which will bring business opportunities to German companies, Chinese experts said at the conference.
For instance, the Action Plan for Water Pollution Prevention and Control released by the State Council on April 16 is expected to add 5.7 trillion yuan ($919 billion) to China's GDP, said Xu Shufan, a senior official with the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
Wang Jinnan, deputy head of the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning, said that China needs to improve its environmental protection technology.
"Environmental infrastructure like desulphurisation equipment for coal-fired plants has been built during China's 10th and 11th Five-Year Plan periods (2001-10)," he said. "For the next stage, China should focus on updating environmental protection technology."
Clauss noted that China also needs to improve its intellectual property environment to attract German environmental firms.
"Over 90 percent of environmental firms in Germany are small and medium-sized, so it is important that their intellectual property rights could be protected," he said.
