Ecological Environment
In recent years, the provincial government has promulgated a series of regulations on environmental protection and launched many ecological construction projects. Nature reserves, ecological demonstration areas and important ecological function areas have been enlarged continuously. A total of 81 nature reserves have been set up in the province. Twenty state-level ecological demonstration areas have been established. Two important ecological function areas at the provincial level were set up to conserve the origin water of Hunhe River and Taizihe River and to stem the invasion of the shifting sand in northwest Liaoning. The ecological diversity has also been effectively protected. In the protection areas there are more than 100 kinds of nationally protected animals and over 40 kinds of protection plants. Liaoning is also an important passage way for the world migrant birds, some 200 kinds of which pass through the province annually. At the same time, Liaoning is the genetic protection base for the world's only rare plant-double-pistil orchid. Dalian and Huludao have been named state-level Garden Cities.
Urban Environment
In Liaoning,urban environment has been improved. Seven of the cities in the province are found to be up to Class C standard in environmental quality and air quality. In order to effectively control the smoke and dust pollution in winter, the provincial government has launched large-scale campaign against smoke and dust for consecutive six years and scored obvious achievements. A total of 93 smoke-and-dust control areas have been established in the province, with a total size of 1,460.6 square km. The province built a plant in Shenyang to bury 240,000 tons of dangerous materials a year. This basically meets the need of northeast China to bury such materials.
Water Conservation
The Liaoning provincial government has worked out plans to improve the Liaohe River valley, Yalujiang River and Dalinghe River, so as to solve the problems of water shortage and pollutions. Polluted water disposal plants have been established or under construction in 11 of the 14 cities directly under the provincial government, and the qualified county-level cities are actively planning to set up polluted-water disposal plants. By the end of the Tenth Five-Year Plan period, the polluted-water disposal capacity will be 5.9 million tons per day. The province has strengthened the disposal capacity of the enterprises which directly discharge pollutants to sea and also tackled the pollution caused by harbors and ships. Since July 2001, the province has taken the lead in China to ban the sale and use of phosphoric detergents, preventing 1,500 tons of phosphorus annually from entering the sea. The non-phosphorus rate of the cities has reached 94 percent and the phosphorus density of the provincial sea space has been decreased from the fourth place to the eighth place in the country. The quality of offshore waters is kept stable.
Afforestation
The provincial government has carried out a series measures to restore forest and grass by forbidding land reclamations. In the past five years, the area has reached 1.1973 million hectares with the survival rate of over 80 percent; 1.113 million hectares of mountainous areas have been newly closed for forestation; and 1.113 million hectares of land suffering from water losses and soil erosion have been treated.
