Developing the Low Carbon Economy (LCE), a strategic option to cope with global warming, should follow a step-by-step pattern in accordance with a country's situation, China's Vice Environment Minister Zhou Jian said in Beijing on Thursday.

Zhou made the remarks at a conference on environment protection.

Zhou said China is in a process of accelerated industrialization, and with its huge population, the country's per-capita income is still very low. Naturally, reducing poverty, developing economy, lifting employment rate and realizing modernization are the major tasks it's facing now.

"As the world's biggest developing country, what Low Carbon Economy means to China is not to reduce the use of fossil fuel like coal, but rather to make efforts to upgrade the utilization efficiency of energy resources to reduce the per unit GDP carbon consumption," he said.

LCE refers to a low energy-consuming and low pollution-based economy that has a minimal output of Greenhouse Gas emissions into the biosphere. Its core is technological innovation and fundamental transfer of the development concept.

Zhou said developing the LCE is a strategic choice to cope with global climate change, and China's long-term development should actively learn, absorb and digest the development ideology of LCE, accelerate the national strategic deployment and start at an early date relevant moves. Meanwhile, it should also enhance its self-innovation ability, develop low-carbon technology and products and employ polices to facilitate the development of LCE.

Representatives from more than 340 domestic and foreign environment non-governmental organizations attended the two-day conference.

(Xinhua News Agency October 31, 2008)