Today, Wu Xiaoqing, Vice Minister of SEPA, met with Mr. Reed, the visiting Special Advisor to UN Secretary General and his retinue. Both sides exchanged views on addressing global climate change and intensifying the environmental publicity and education.

Mr. Wu said China was confronted with sharp and complicated environmental problems in its drive to promote industrialization and urbanization. The government highly valued these problems and tried its best to solve them. Not long ago, the government proposed strategic goals for environmental protection in the 11^th Five-Year Plan for Socio-economic Development, in order to ensure that by 2010, the environmental quality will have been improved remarkably while maintaining rapid and steady economic growth. One of the goals is to reduce the energy consumption of per unit GDP by 20% and the emissions of major pollutants by 10%. These targets are being allocated around the country for implementation.

Mr. Wu said as one of the most remarkable environmental issues around the world, climate change is imposing great impacts on people's life and production activities. Being a large developing country, China has given due attention to global environmental issues including climate change, by tightening pollution control and through improving scientific research, legal, publicity, and institutional mechanisms, responding to the climate change. Currently, Chinese Government also contributes to reducing GHG emissions by closing down and suspending more heavily polluting enterprises and illegal pollutant-discharge enterprises and by cutting down the emissions of pollutants.

Mr. Wu pointed out that while all the countries around the world should actively address climate change, the responsibility of mitigating climate change should be discussed according to varied national conditions and within the framework of sustainable development. China would follow the consensus agreed upon by Kyoto Protocol and other international conventions and insist on the common but differentiated responsibility. Developed countries emitted much more GHGs than developing countries in the past and have more per capita emissions now. This is undisputable. Therefore, developed countries should shoulder the major duty to address climate change. In quite a long time in the future, developing countries still cannot afford to accomplish quantitative tasks for emissions reduction, but they can contribute to mitigating climate change by promoting CDM and sustainable development strategy. In this process, United Nations may play the role of a coordinator, and actively persuade the world countries to cooperate and discuss the policies on addressing climate change. China is ready to cooperate with United Nations on environmental protection and climate change and together solve the environmental issues around the world.

Mr. Reed appreciated the immense efforts of China devoted to environmental protection and the responses to the climate change, and expected that China would continue to exert its influence in the international environmental affairs, actively take part in the international cooperation on talent exchange and environmental publicity and education, share the experience with other countries and promote the development of the world environment cause.