By Jason Subler and Eadie Chen BEIJING, March 5 (Reuters) - Chinese officials fanned out at the start of the annual session of parliament to pledge concrete steps to implement Premier Wen Jiabao's demand that China do more to protect the environment while keeping the economy growing. China last year missed its goals of cutting by 4 percent the amount of energy it uses to generate each unit of national income and of reducing emissions of key pollutants by 2 percent. Wen said in his work report at the opening of the National People's Congress on Monday that those were steadfast aims that could not be compromised. A senior official with the Ministry of Land and Resources said several government agencies were working on a plan to completely halt issuing land-use permits for new investment projects in highly polluting, energy-intensive industries. The ministry had already set up a task force to inspect such projects and had sent teams to nine provinces to check whether newly approved investment projects met the necessary criteria, the official told Reuters. "Last year, we already introduced many measures to control the supply of land, but they weren't implemented very effectively. So this year, one of our biggest priorities is to make sure they are effectively carried out," he said. China last year said it would make less land available for resource-hungry projects that cause pollution, but the official said the new initiative would be much stricter. Other officials promised further measures in their own areas. PERFORMANCE REVIEWS Speaking over the weekend, Pan Yue, deputy head of the State Environmental Protection Administration, called for officials to be evaluated according to their environmental record. "Given the way things work in China, if you really put such things into officials' appraisals, that can help effect a fundamental change in the system," Pan told reporters. China has experimented with a system for assessing local officials on the basis of "green GDP", a measure of economic output that takes into account the environmental costs of growth. Beijing has also begun to make energy-saving and control of air pollution key to officials' career prospects, aiming to reverse the single-minded focus on economic growth that has long been the ticket to success. But Pan said more needed to be done. Because the green GDP concept was not yet mature, he said the government should judge officials by existing, measurable criteria such as air quality, investments in environmental technology and their record in implementing regulations. Beijing was planning to roll out a scheme, which has already been piloted, whereby it would withhold approval for projects in regions or industries that had missed their environmental targets, he said. The government might repeal honorary titles for environmental performance, such as "green city", if local governments slacked off on pollution and energy targets -- a potentially potent weapon in a face-conscious country like China. To show that the agency was serious, Pan said it had rejected 160 billion yuan in investments on environmental grounds last year in response to public complaints. Zhang Jianyu, China programme manager for U.S.-based non-governmental organisation Environmental Defense, said that while it was good to improve enforcement of environmental laws, Pan's proposals did not cut to the root of the matter. What China really needed to do, Zhang said, was to increase what he called "tragically low" penalties for violators -- currently capped at 200,000 yuan for normal violations under the Water Law, and at 1 million yuan for extreme cases.
