Bringing back dark green mountains, azure skies, limpid rivers and white clouds is the ambitious new goal for east China's Jiangsu Province, according to sources with the provincial government.

An provincial official told a work conference on urban-rural programming which opened Tuesday that Jiangsu has a comprehensive environmental improvement program for the next five years.

Half of Jiangsu, a province located in the Yangtze River Delta area, has been urbanized. There are now five super-sized cities, five big cities, nine medium sized cities, 45 small cities which are home to 37 million urban residents.

Accelerated urbanization means more people will move to cities over the next five years in Jiangsu, which wants to see 55 percentof its population living in urban areas.

The province plans to build and optimize its urban road networkto ease traffic congestions. Super sized cities as Nanjing, Suzhou,and Wuxi will develop mass transit systems including the No. 2 metro in Nanjing, which will cost 10.5 billion yuan (about US$1.3 billion).

New sewage treatment facilities are also in the works for province. It plans to treat more than 85 percent of the sewage flowing into the Huaihe river by the end of 2006.

Jiangsu will also enlarge its green space to cover 40 percent of its land mass by 2010 as the cities of Nanjing, Suzhou and Yangzhou will be transformed into 'eco-garden' cities by 2010, said the official.

A cleaner environment and better water resources in rural Jiangsu is also a priority.

(Xinhua News Agency March 9, 2006)