The completion of the program will result in sewage treatment services for a land area equivalent to at least half of Europe.

Much improvement is likely to be seen in the water supply and drainage systems for China's small cities, Wang Xiaolu, a senior research fellow with the China Reform Foundation, tells China Business Weekly.

Small-scale, decentralized wastewater treatment facilities will also be promoted in the country's rural areas, according to Zhou Shengxian.

The stimulus plan will not come at the price of environmental deterioration, Zhou claims. Money will not be used for the energy and resource-intensive and high-emission projects, he says.

The projects' impacts on the environment have to be carefully examined before being approved by the NDRC, say sources from Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP).

China's Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Law, effective since 2003, requires identifying and evaluating adverse effects to the environment and proposing measurements to mitigate them prior to construction.

The latest statistics from MEP show that emissions from the country's two major pollutants continued to drop in the first three quarters of this year.

Emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2) fell by 2.7 percent compared to the same period last year, and the chemical oxygen demand (COD), a measure of water pollution, dropped by 4.2 percent.

(China Daily November 24, 2008)