The Fifth Central Ecological and Environmental Protection Supervision Group gave feedback on the inspection to Qinghai Province

In order to thoroughly implement Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization, according to the "Central Ecological and Environmental Protection Supervision Work Regulations", the Fifth Central Ecological and Environmental Protection Supervision Group(hereinafter referred to as the inspection team)The third round of ecological and environmental protection inspections was carried out in Qinghai Province. On January 30, 2024, the 2nd meeting of the 20th Central Leading Group for Ecological and Environmental Protection Supervision deliberated and approved the inspection report. With the approval of the Party Central Committee and the State Council, the inspection team gave feedback to the Qinghai Provincial Party Committee and the Provincial Government on February 26, 2024. Liu Wei, the leader of the inspection team, reported the inspector report, Chen Gang, secretary of the Qinghai Provincial Party Committee, made a statement, and Wu Xiaojun, governor of Qinghai Province, presided over the meeting. Hu Weilie, deputy head of the group, relevant personnel of the inspection team, relevant leaders of the Qinghai Provincial Party Committee and the provincial government, and the main responsible comrades of relevant departments and the party and government of various cities and prefectures attended the meeting.

The inspector believes that Qinghai Province has conscientiously studied and implemented Xi Jinping's ecological civilization thought and the spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping's important instructions on Qinghai's ecological environmental protection, and has made great efforts to build an ecological civilization highland, solidly promote the protection and restoration of natural ecology, and deeply fight the battle of pollution prevention and control.

Qinghai Province has established the concept of "ecological priority" and carried out in-depth comprehensive improvement of the ecological environment in the Muli mining area and the Qinghai area at the southern foot of the Qilian Mountains. Conscientiously implement the Yellow River Protection Law and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Ecological Protection Law, and the province's ecological legislation accounts for 26% of the total number of legislation. Establish a coordinated working mechanism for discipline inspection, supervision and ecological environment supervision, and carry out special inspections such as urban sewage collection and treatment along the Huangshui River and "escorting the construction of ecological civilization highlands" in the Sanjiangyuan area.

Efforts should be made to build an ecological civilization highland. We will carry out the construction of a demonstration province of the nature reserve system with national parks as the main body, complete the pilot project of ecological protection and restoration of mountains, rivers, forests, fields and lakes in the Qilian Mountains, implement ecological projects such as the integrated protection and restoration of mountains, rivers, forests, fields, lakes, grasslands and sands in the Huangshui Basin of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and launch key projects of the Hexi Corridor-Taklamakan Desert edge resistance war. 6.045 million mu of sand prevention and control have been completed, and the comprehensive vegetation coverage of grasslands in the province has reached 57.9%. The populations of representative animals such as snow leopard, Przewalski's gazelle and Tibetan antelope showed a recovery trend, and the results of biodiversity conservation were remarkable.

Actively promote green and low-carbon development. Solid progress has been made in the protection and restoration of key river basins, the management of rivers and lakes, and the protection of drinking water sources, and the water quality of the main stream of the Yellow River, the Yangtze River, and the Lancang River is at or above Class II. Formulate action plans and plans for national clean energy industry highlands and international eco-tourism destinations, and the installed capacity of clean energy accounts for 91% of the total installed power capacity. Environmental quality continues to improve, and the proportion of days with good ambient air quality in the province will reach 96.6% in 2023.

Qinghai Province attaches great importance to the inspection work, supervises and reforms, implements reforms, and solves a number of ecological and environmental problems around the masses. As of the end of December 2023, the 1,192 cases reported by the masses assigned by the inspection team have all been completed or completed in stages, 188 have been ordered to rectify, 36 have been punished, 11 have been filed and investigated, 322 people have been interviewed, and 58 people have been held accountable.

The inspector pointed out that Qinghai Province has achieved great results in the construction of ecological civilization and ecological environmental protection, but there is still a gap in the work compared with the requirements of the construction of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau ecological civilization highland and the people's expectations for a better ecological environment.

First, there is a gap in the practice of Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization.Some localities and departments still have a shallow understanding of Qinghai's "ecological priority", and the performance of ecological and environmental protection responsibilities is not strong enough, and there are problems of relaxation and softness. Some of them do not have high standards when they promote their work, and some have a tendency to not develop when ecological protection is mentioned, or forget about ecological protection when it is developed.

The extensive and disorderly development of salt lake resources in the Qaidam Basin has aggravated the burden on the ecological environment. The potassium chloride production plant in the Zarkhan salt lake has been overproducing for a long time, and the actual annual production from 2019 to 2022 exceeded the mining permit by 57.9% to 84.1%. Qinghai Development Investment Alkali Industry and other enterprises did not implement the requirements of limiting production, and also responded to the inspection with false accounts. Some enterprises in Golmud City have privately dug salt pans and exploited them extensively, resulting in the accumulation of waste residue in the salt lake mining area into mountains and ravines on the surface. The departments concerned passed the buck to each other in the rectification work, and the problem of violations of laws and regulations remained unresolved for a long time. Enterprises such as Development Investment Alkali Industry, China Salt Qinghai Kunlun Alkali Industry and other enterprises have illegally occupied land for a long time and encroached on natural pasture land. Zangge Potash Fertilizer, Jintai Potash Fertilizer, AVIC Resources, and a number of subsidiaries of Qinghai Salt Lake Industry Co., Ltd. have all violated water intake and water use.

Grassland ecological protection is not effective. The problem of overloading of natural grasslands in Guoluo, Huangnan, Haibei and other prefectures is prominent. The overlapping area of the grassland and livestock balance area in the province, the nature reserve that should be forbidden grazing, and the severely degraded grassland reached 39.14 million mu and 10.31 million mu respectively. The formulation of the restoration plan of the black soil beach is not scientific, and some grassland improvement plots do not have the conditions for restoration; some projects do not set up acceptance samples according to the specifications, and the acceptance is passed by a simple inspection during the joint acceptance of the province and state; some places do not pay attention to the management and protection in the later stage, and the grassland restoration results return to the old state after less than two years.

Some inspectors are not strict and untruthful in rectification. Some enterprises in Haixi Prefecture have caused environmental pollution caused by the direct discharge of high-concentration production wastewater into drying tanks, and after the relevant departments have supervised it many times, the local government has still not taken substantive rectification measures, and the problem still exists. There are deficiencies in the rectification of urban and rural garbage collection and disposal problems in Haidong City, and individual landfills in Mutual Aid County and Xunhua County have not been closed for treatment after they are out of use.

Second, the protection and restoration of natural ecology is not in place.The clean-up and rectification of small hydropower plants has been slow, and 23 of the 64 small hydropower stations listed in the "exit category" have not completed the withdrawal plan. A number of small hydropower stations located in the core areas or buffer zones of national nature reserves have been retained as "rectification and reform" without special demonstration. The rectification plans for the nine small hydropower stations approved by Huangyuan County in Xining City did not meet the ecological protection requirements such as "building fish facilities, restoring river connectivity, and implementing breeding and release" in the retrospective environmental impact assessment report, while the rectification plans for the two small hydropower stations approved by Datong County claimed that the above requirements had been strictly implemented, but no relevant work was actually carried out. Some small hydropower stations in Hainan, Huangnan, Haidong and other places have chaotic ecological flow monitoring, there are problems such as the discharge flow cannot be guaranteed, the data is changed, and some rivers have water reduction and dehydration, which seriously affects the ecological environment of the river, and the supervision of relevant departments is a mere formality. There are 7 small hydropower stations with diversion type distributed in the 10-kilometer section of the river in Garang Township, and the riverbed is exposed and dried up in a large area, which seriously affects the ecological environment of the river. Hydropower stations such as Lijiaxia and Huangfeng have not implemented measures such as fish breeding and release and artificial fishing over dams in a timely manner.

The remediation of the ecological environment of the mine is lagging behind. The two coal mines of the Xihai Coal Development Company in Gangcha County, Haibei Prefecture have formed eight open-pit mining pits, and a large amount of waste slag is piled up on the slope; the amount of earth and stone that should be backfilled is 66.94 million cubic meters, but only 8.65 million cubic meters are actually backfilled, and only 7,470 mu of the 12,600 mu of slag that needs to be treated have been completed, and the remediation is seriously lagging behind; and the 150,000 cubic meters of asbestos tailings waste in Qilian County is stored in the open air, and there are hidden environmental hazards. However, the above-mentioned enterprises have passed the 7 acceptance gates of the comprehensive improvement of the local ecological environment and sold their numbers. Golmud City, Haixi Prefecture, arbitrarily reduced the area of the Kunlun Mountain National Geopark, and nine prospecting rights and one mining right originally located in the park were transferred. The level of large-scale and intensive resource development in Dulan County, Haixi Prefecture is not high, and 45 enterprises illegally occupy 3,894 acres of grassland, and the problem of ecological damage is prominent.

Grassland and desertified land have been illegally reclaimed. A number of land consolidation projects in Delingha City, Haixi Prefecture, illegally reclaimed nearly 17,000 mu of natural pasture land, and the local government also issued false certificates that natural pasture land was desertified grassland. The land development and compensation balance project implemented by the Dachaidan Executive Committee has reclaimed cultivated land on extremely desertified land, of which 5,000 mu of land in the Mahai area cannot pass the acceptance.

Third, there are shortcomings in the implementation of the ecological protection and high-quality development strategy of the Yellow River Basin.There is a gap in the implementation of rigid constraints on water resources, and the water conservancy departments of Ping'an District and Xunhua County of Haidong City have exceeded their authority in examining and approving water intake permits, and relevant enterprises take nearly 2 million cubic meters of water from the main stream of the Huangshui River every year. Since September 2018, the Beichuan River Ecological River Construction Project in Xining City has taken water without a water intake permit, the Xining Garden Expo Park Project has taken 510,000 cubic meters of water in excess from 2019 to 2022, and Haidong Science and Technology Investment Company has taken 3.61 million cubic meters of water from the Huangshui River without authorization.

The problem of urban sewage collection and treatment is prominent. Xining, Haidong and other cities did not carry out pipe network investigation in a timely manner as required, and the problems of mixed and misconnected rain and sewage pipe networks, functional defects of old pipelines were prominent, and the centralized collection rate of domestic sewage was low. From May to October 2023, 4.08 million tons of rainwater were directly discharged from the overflow near the third sewage treatment plant. The construction period of the expansion and renovation project of the sewage treatment plant in Xunhua County, Haidong City has been delayed, and the construction period of the sewage treatment project in the north area of the city has changed from 2018 to 2021 and then to 2023, and the project is still in the stage of site leveling at the time of inspection. Due to the lack of collection of pipe networks and insufficient sewage treatment capacity, a large amount of domestic sewage in Xining, Haidong and other places overflowed and was directly discharged, and some were directly discharged into the Yellow River. The centralized sewage collection rate in the built-up areas of Delingha City, Golmud City and Mangya City in Haixi Prefecture is low, and the five-day biochemical oxygen demand concentration of inlet water in some domestic sewage treatment plants does not meet the target requirements. Some inspection and testing institutions falsified the monitoring report, and the Haixi Runtu Testing Company only collected the water sample from the outlet of the Delingha Sewage Treatment Plant once, but the sampling time in the monitoring report was three times.

There are weak links in the ecological protection of Qinghai Lake. There are still problems in the operation of surrounding sewage treatment facilities, there is still a gap in non-point source pollution control, and the water quality of some rivers entering the lake has been affected. Abnormal proliferation of bristle algae occurred near the mouth of the main river in Qinghai Lake and in the coastal areas. The first phase of the Gangcha County Sewage Treatment Plant in Haibei Prefecture was suspended for nine months on the grounds of failure, during which 466,000 tons of domestic sewage were discharged directly into the Shaliu River without treatment. The chemical oxygen demand and total nitrogen of the effluent of the Heimahe Sewage Treatment Plant in Gonghe County, Hainan Prefecture have exceeded the standard for many times, and the water quality of the section of the Daoliu River has been inferior to Class V for many times.

Illegal breeding in prohibited breeding areas. Qinghai Province did not designate the core area of the National Aquatic Germplasm Resources Conservation Area for Endemic Fish in the Guide Section of the Yellow River and the Jianzha Section of the Yellow River as a forbidden area in the planning of tidal flats for aquaculture waters, and the two enterprises have been raising fish in the core area of the reserve for a long time.

Fourth, there are other issues that need attention.Energy intensity is poorly controlled, with a cumulative increase of 6.2% from 2021 to 2022 and a year-on-year increase of 1.4% in the first half of 2023. Among the 27 ferroalloy enterprises and 12 cement enterprises in the province, 16 and 4 have not reached the industry benchmark level respectively.

Hazardous waste disposal is not standardized. Since its completion in August 2021, the Haixi Hazardous Waste Disposal Center has not been in normal operation conditions for a long time, and more than 2,100 tons of hazardous waste have been stored beyond the time limit. The anti-seepage measures of the electrolytic aluminum slag yard of individual enterprises in Xining City are not in place, and the disposal measures for the overhaul slag of electrolytic aluminum are simple. A large number of asbestos tailings and waste rock from Haixi Chuang'an Company formed 7 tailings piles, and pollution prevention and control measures were not in place. The design scale of Xining sludge disposal center cannot meet the actual demand, and the sludge of individual enterprises is stored in the open air at will, which has potential environmental risks.

The inspector required that Qinghai Province should resolutely implement Xi Jinping's thought on ecological civilization, keep in mind the "three largest" provincial positioning and the "three more important" strategic positioning, and promote the construction of Qinghai's ecological civilization to continuously achieve new results. Implement the strategy of ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin, and regard water resources as the greatest rigid constraint. Promote the orderly development of salt lake resources, consolidate the comprehensive improvement of the ecological environment in the Muli mining area and the southern foot of the Qilian Mountains, and strengthen the overall systematic protection of rare and endangered species. Strictly implement the requirements of grass to determine livestock, balance grass and livestock, and strictly prohibit overgrazing, etc., deeply fight the battle to defend the blue sky, clear water, and pure land, accelerate the completion of the shortcomings in urban domestic sewage collection and treatment, strengthen environmental risk management and control, and continue to improve the quality of the ecological environment. Earnestly solve the outstanding ecological and environmental problems that the masses of the people have strongly resented. For the issue of dereliction of duty and responsibility, the relevant departments should be instructed to further conduct in-depth investigations, clarify responsibilities, and hold them accountable in a serious, accurate, and effective manner. Where it is necessary to carry out compensation for ecological and environmental damages or to initiate public interest litigation, it shall be handled in accordance with relevant provisions.

The inspector stressed that the Qinghai Provincial Party Committee and the Provincial Government should study and formulate a rectification plan according to the inspection report and in accordance with the requirements of the "Central Ecological and Environmental Protection Supervision and Rectification Work Measures", and submit it to the Party Central Committee and the State Council within 45 working days. The rectification plan and the situation of the rectification should be disclosed to the public in accordance with relevant provisions.

The inspection team also sorted out the problems of accountability for ecological and environmental damage that were discovered, and handed them over to the Qinghai Provincial Party Committee and the Provincial Government for handling in accordance with relevant regulations.