(Yicai) March 5 -- China's government zooms in on green development in a work report released today by the State Council and members of the ongoing Two Sessions.

China needs to coordinate to reduce carbon emissions and pollution, per the report. It must expand green development and growth to build a beautiful China with humans and nature coexisting in harmony, it added.

The Two Sessions, which will continue till March 11, are annual plenary meetings of the NPC, China’s top legislative body, and the National Committee of the CPPCC, the country’s top political advisory body.

The nation has made significant progress in its energy transition in the past few years, which has been widely recognized by the international community, Chang Jiwen, deputy director at an institute of the Development Research Center of the State Council, told Yicai. China should continue to promote this transition this year and in the next few years, and the work report reflects such development, Chang added.

Next, China needs to comprehensively promote the green and digital transformation of industry, agriculture, transportation, construction, and social life nationwide through measures such as improving the pricing mechanism of carbon emissions, expanding the coverage of the national carbon trading market, and advancing the initiative to replace household appliances, Chang suggested.

It is necessary to establish a sound and stable mechanism to gain funding, strictly implement the environmental protection tax law, enrich green financial products, and attract more financial resources to environmental development, said Wang Jinnan, a member of the Standing Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

China should set reasonable goals to make use of renewable energy and accelerate the marketization of feed-in tariffs for producers of low-emission energy, Zhang Tianren, a deputy to the National People’s Congress and chairman of battery maker Tianneng Holding Group, said to Yicai.

Given that the energy consumption of iron and steel producers makes up about 11 percent of China's total, the country should urge these firms to build a closed-loop power network with energy storage at its core, and use smart digital technologies to transform the energy system to improve operational efficiency, said Liu Huaiping, a deputy to the NPC, and vice president of the China Association of Environmental Protection Industry.

Editor: Emmi Laine