China to boost land reclamation in mining areas

BEIJING -- The Ministry of Land and Resources is expected to issue specific measures to facilitate the implementation of a regulation to reclaim land, especially in mining areas.

The specific measures have finished collecting public opinion and are expected to help implement the Land Restoration Regulation, said Liu Yanping, deputy chief engineer of the law center under the Ministry of Land and Resources, on Thursday at an ecological restoration forum.

China passed the Land Restoration Regulation in February last year.

China's 1,500-plus mining districts occupy about about 2 million hectares of land, and the figure is expanding by 33,000 to 47,000 hectares annually, Liu said.

But the land reclamation ratio is merely 15 percent, far below the international level, which mainly stands at around 50 to 70 percent, Liu said.

Land destroyed near coal mines makes up about 80 percent of the total ruined by all kinds of mining. Thus, future efforts will mainly focus on coal mine areas, said Hu Zhenqi, secretary general of the land reclamation and ecological restoration committee of the China Coal Society.

The report to the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasized the importance of ecological progress and advocated the building of a "beautiful" China in the country's overall development plan.