THE government will encourage banks to play a bigger role in providing the financing required to tackle mounting environmental problems in rural regions, a government official said Friday.

    The Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has admitted that the countryside has been a “weak link” in the country’s “war on pollution,” which has mainly focused on cutting hazardous smog in industrialized regions like Hebei.

    The government has been looking for new ways to fund efforts to remediate contaminated land, cut fertilizer use and tackle the vast amounts of untreated household waste that threaten rural soil and water supplies, but governments have continued to foot most of the bill.

    To help meet the vast funding gap, new guidelines have now been drawn up to encourage banks to provide more financial support for rural environmental treatment enterprises and encourage the use of public-private partnerships, the official said in comments published in China Environmental News, the publication of the MEP.

    The official said China aims to treat or utilize 60 percent of livestock waste by the end of 2020. It would also aim to “effectively treat” more than 90 percent of rural household waste by the end of the decade.

    In addition, China will use favorable power prices and other preferential policies to encourage the construction of biomass and biogas power plants in rural areas, he added.(SD-Agencies)