Environment vs growth debate heats up in China

"There are no new instructions from state agencies since the end of the pilot project last year, and we have no plans for provincial green GDP statistics," said Gao Bozhou, a statistics official in the central province of Anhui.

Gao, who oversaw Anhui's participation in the experiment, said it was hard for a province to assess green GDP in isolation.

Anhui, for example, suffers from pollution carried downstream on the Huai River from adjoining Henan province. "But Henan is very reluctant to build Anhui's losses into its own green GDP."

Being an island, Hainan faces no such difficulties. China's southernmost province is trying to calculate local green GDP and hopes to issue the results by late this year or early 2008.

"Hainan has little pollution, so the green GDP result will be good," said Wang Yuan, a Hainan statistics official.

The rich eastern province of Zhejiang is also doing its sums -- warily. Li Rongrong, a local number cruncher, said even the phrase "green GDP" is a bit controversial. Instead, Zhejiang is calculating the "price of high GDP growth", Li said.

And then there's the question of calibrating the findings.

"If we relax the standards, the results will give a wrong impression to decision makers that sustainable development has already been achieved; but if we use strict standards, officials won't be happy to see a sudden drop in the economic growth rate on their watch," Li said.

Gao Minxue, a professor at China Renmin University in Beijing, said it would take China a long time to build up a real green GDP reporting system.

"At present, many local governments still have no clear idea what green GDP is," said Gao, who helped with the first, and for now solitary, nationwide set of calculations.