NATURAL RESOURCE ASSET MANAGEMENT AND LAND AND SPATIAL PLANNING

Abstract

At the beginning, the author examines the concepts of natural environment, natural resource, and natural resource asset and the ecological services what natural resources could provide as ecosystems, including supporting services, provisioning services, regulating services, and cultural services. The author stresses that, in China, the survey and assessment of resource assets face many difficulties in defining ownerships and tenures, rights and responsibilities, and valuation, and extensive exploitation and utilization still dominates the country's natural resource management. He argues that ecological damage and environmental degradation often resulted from over-exploitation of resources; on the whole, China's recent ecological restoration has not seen a substantial improvement, largely resulting from the separate and inconsistent practice, ill enforcement, and the weak public awareness of ecological remediation and restoration in the country. He highlights that China's new reform of a Super-Ministry System (including the establishments of the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment), as well as the implementation of the Integrated Planning policy, has facilitated an integrated management on natural resource conservation. Finally, the author underscores that, in the future, the Chinese government ought to coordinate its land and spatial planning with domestic socio-economic planning, and urban planning professionals are expected to go beyond engineering and technical explorations and realize planning approaches as tools that would truly and efficiently cope with societal challenges and improve the quality of development.