Economic Development, Population Growth and Environmental Concerns in China和美德
白天的月亮
Introduction
China's recent rapid economic growth has come at a cost of environmental degradation. Various factors, including the conflict between economic development and environmental concerns, insufficient government regulation of China's environment, and lack of public awareness regarding environmental issues have hindered China's effort to find a proper balance between economic prosperity and its environmental health.
Population Growth
China's population, the world's largest, grew by almost 7 million people last year, according to an official report. China's National Bureau of Statistics said in a report that the country's population was 1,314,480,000 at the end of 2006, an increa of 6.92 million people. The bureau said males accounted for 51.5 percent of the population, adding that the ratio of males to female newborns stood at 119.25 to 100 in 2006.
赛马串词>口腔诊所规章制度
The gender imbalance is a growing problem in China, with state media reporting last month that there will be 30 million more men of marriageable age than women in less than 15 years.
China impod strict population controls, including a policy of one child for almost all couples, in the 1970s to limit growth of its huge population. One side effect has been a jump in gender lection of babies. Traditional preferences for a son mean some women abort their baby if an early term sonogram shows it is a girl.
淡淡一笑As the world's population is approximately 6.6 billion, China reprents a full 20% of the world's population so one in every five people on the planet is a resident of China. 眼睛周围
The report said that urban residents accounted for 43.9 percent of the total population by the end of the year, up 0.9 percentage points from 2005.
Population growth and environmental concerns are directly intertwined. Environmental pollution has its most rious impact on human health in denly populated regions wher
e agricultural and industrial activities overlap, and tremendous pressure is placed on resources cloly linked to the environment, such as land, water, and climate.
The damage that China's massive population and continuous economic growth have caud to its environment is "basically irreversible in the medium term." Although population growth alone is no longer a major contributor to China's ongoing environmental degradation, there is a correlation between China's natural environment and population growth.
First, the big population has a great demand for employment. Mushrooming township and village enterpris have absorbed much of this demand. The jobs are less likely to require technological skills and are usually found in industries that u energy and resources inefficiently. The pollution-generated industries are not clod down becau of concerns over laying off large numbers of workers. Environmental concerns thus take a backat to economic growth.
Second, enhanced living standards will only aggravate China's environmental problems.
The ri in living standards has produced a greater demand for an abundance of quality food.
This stimulates incread agricultural production through the u of fertilizer and pesticides, which increas the amount of contaminated water relead into rivers, lakes, and oceans. Likewi, increas in houhold income has led to rising demands for water, electricity, heating, air conditioning, and transportation which also effects China's environment adverly.
联通流量
Since ending restrictions on population movement as part of its economic reforms, China's urban population has incread considerably. By 2004, China's urban population accounted for nearly forty-two percent of its total population. This has led to the concentration of pollution in China's cities. One-fourth of China's urban population live in areas that suffer from vere air pollution as well as problems related to solid wastes, noi, and contaminated tap water. It is also alarming that much of this urbanization trend has occurred at the expen of most of China's arable lands, thus jeopardizing its food production capacity.
China's Environmental Issues and Economic Growth
绝句七言The economic and technological reforms that have promoted agricultural, industrial and energy development in China during the past two decades have also produced a proliferation of rural industries that have undermined the balance of the ecosystem and reduced the productivity of farms, lakes, rivers, forests, grasslands, wetlands, and coastal regions. But as the tension between economic interest and environmental concerns has become more salient and pronounced, the state continues to favor the former at the expen of the latter.
In the last two decades, China has experienced tremendous economic growth. Its GNP grew by an average of 10 percent annually between 1981 and 1991, and 11.6% from 1991 to 1995. Since 1995, the rate of China's economic growth has slowed down to between eight and nine percent becau of the state government's determination to curb inflation.
