哥本哈根气候变化大会，把全世界的目光前所未有地集中到了绿色、环保、低碳、减排、生态等等问题上，这是个极富历史意义的时刻。事实上，我与我的好朋友——前纽约环境保护局局长、世界上一流的水处理专家AL APPLETON先生早在2004年就提出来，中国政府必须重视环保，特别是水资源问题。

以下就是一篇当年为此而作的文章，全英文发布，请各位网友一起来翻译比赛，我们会根据大家的翻译结果评选出优胜并予以一定奖励，同时翻译的结果也会一起收录在我们本期季刊绿色低碳主题文章中，以引起读者朋友们对中国环境保护的重视。

欢迎大家都来积极参与！

截止时间：12月14日前

（接前一篇）

Part III Some Initial Tools for Sustainability Planning

Reconciling economic growth with environmental needs is the task planners must carry out successfully if China is to achieve sustainability. The following are some concepts and techniques whose application may help reach that goal. .

The first is value recapture. If the environment is costing China many billions of dollars in lost GDP and forcing it to spend billions more in environmental infrastructure, than better environmental policy should save and recapture much of those funds. Part of a market based environmental policy therefore consists of using part of those cost savings to pay for the environmental improvements needed. For example, in the early 1990s, New York City faced a growing shortage of water and contemplated spending $3 billion to build a new complex of waterworks on the Hudson River. Instead, it chose to invest in $500 million worth of water conservation measures, which succeeded in permanently lowering New York's water consumption by 20%, eliminating the need to build the new waterworks complex. By using a portion of the proposed facility cost to fund a more environmentally sustainable alternative, New York saved $2.5 billion without any additional external investment.

Since the New York water utility which would have funded the new waterworks also funded the water conservation program, those savings were easy to capture. In other instances such as improvements in environmental health, a more diffuse institutional framework makes value recapture harder. For example, if improved pollution control were to reduce the incidence of respiratory disease by 50%, the savings to China in health care costs and improved worker productivity would be immense. But they would be dispersed among thousands of employers, employees and providers of health care. Similarly, if an upstream polluter stops polluting, the direct benefit may go primarily to a downstream water user.

Creativity is thus required to devise systems where these savings are captured and able to be shared, for example, by the downstream water user sharing in the upstream costs of pollution control, or by the government and the insurance industry identifying ways to calculate and reinvest in the environment their potential savings in health care costs. Access to especially desirable land or development bonuses can be given locally to those who are committed to use sustainable business practice. Payment systems for water or solid waste can incorporate incentives for environmental best practices based on the savings that such practices will return. Devising ways to fund, particularly at the local level, environmental sustainability by using some of the profits sustainability will produce should be a key concern of planners.

Another market based tool for promoting environmental sustainability is the concept of ecosystem services. An ecosystem service is a term used to describe the economically valuable services unspoiled ecosystems provides the economy. These include clean air, clean water, natural water purification, ongoing streams of forest produces and natural food stuffs, carbon sequestration, soil stabilization, biological pharmaceutical products and ecotourism.

An ecosystem service seeks to fund the preservation, or in many cases the restoration, of the environmental integrity of rural landscapes by magnetizing the value of the economic resources that landscape provides. It is a market based tool that enables the residents of regional landscapes to make money by being environmental stewards and adds a whole new economic foundation to regions that have traditionally been limited to being producers of food and fiber or extractors of timber and minerals, and who have often pursued strategies of industrialization as their only hope for economic improvement. Traditional environmental regulation has directly clashed with the economic interests of rural populations, for its prohibitory regulations have added to their production costs while giving them no benefit in return.

Ecosystem service concepts are a market tool that can transform that equation. It replaces environmental regulation with investment in environmental stewardship, investments that raises local incomes and build local economies. In turn, the local regional economy gains a new vested interest in the integrity of their local environment. Most often, the resources to support programs of ecosystem services come from urban areas, who are the principal consumer of ecosystem services. The benefit for the urban areas, which traditionally have not had to pay for such services, is that preserving the ability of nature to provide those services through an urban rural partnership is far cheaper than paying to cleanup those resources once their natural sources are degraded...

The classic model of the an ecosystem services program, and one that has been cited and emulated worldwide is the watershed protection program developed in the early 1990s to protect the quality of New York City's drinking water from rural pollution, That program was developed by the author of this chapter, with the support of the New York City Planning Commission on which James Jao, the principal author of this work, was then serving.

New York City is one of the few cities in the world that until recently has not had to mechanically filter its drinking water before using it. In an act that combined great planning foresight with brilliant water engineering, New York City created a series of rural watersheds, some as far as 200 kilometers from Manhattan, from which it could draw the abundant pristine drinking water regarded by experts as the best in the world.

However, by the late 1980s, the rise of industrial forms of agriculture, combined with the spread of suburban development into the watershed, threatened to add enough pollution to the New York's drinking water sources so that keeping it safe to drink would require New York to build enormous purification facilities at a cost of billions of dollars. Seeking a more cost effective solution, New York City chose to negotiate an environmental partnership with the farmers and small towns of the watershed. It created a locally managed pollution control partnership with watershed farmers under the terms of which the farmers changed their practices to be environ-mentally sustainable, in exchange for ongoing payments from the City, thereby raising their income more than they would have received from traditional, polluting farm practice. Similarly, the City agreed with the local towns to provide them with stewardship payments and to support environmentally sustainable development in exchange for their agreement to forego and environmentally destructive or water polluting new development or industry. 

By agreeing to a program of sustainable watershed management, the approximately 200,000 watershed residents gained a higher level of income and a more attractive way of life.For its part, New York City gained major reductions in pollution loadings in the watershed, preserving the quality of its drinking water and ending the need to build expensive purification facilities. And even given its scope, the City's watershed program cost less than 20% of the cost of what building purification facilities would have cost, making the program essentially self funding.

Since New York's pioneering efforts, numerous programs of ecosystem services have been developed globally, preserving many environmental resources at a fraction of the cost of traditional measures. This makes an important final point. Preserving the ability of landscape to provide valuable ecological services is a sophisticated, market based planning technique.

A third key technique for pursuing environmental sustainability is watershed planning, the development of land use and environmental strategies based on the needs and characteristics of a stream or stream system's entire catchments area.

Even in very site-specific urban projects, watershed analysis can be an extremely valuable tool for highlighting site-specific characteristics and for identifying ways to minimize environmental costs and impacts. On a regional scale, it can highlight opportunities for ecosystem service approaches, help identify how to integrate environmental measures with local development benefits, and pinpoint the environmental implications of land use decisions with great precision. It also provides a unified landscape perspective to set against the geographically and institutionally fragmented perspectives that often set the framework for planning.

Another critical concept is pollution prevention. Pollution prevention is generally faster, cheaper, and more consistent with sustainable environmental management than trying to clean-up pollution after it takes place. The planning challenge is to identify in advance the environmental impacts of a particular project, develop plans to minimize them without sacrificing the benefits of the development, identify the extra costs of pollution control and create a strategy for addressing them.

When pollution prevention is combined with resource conservation the result is the rapidly growing green buildings or green facilities movement. This means that both state of the art pollution control technology, and all applicable water and energy conservation measures, is incorporated into every aspect of the development. This includes reviewing every aspect of the development so that no opportunity for sustainable, long term cost saving investment is overlooked, whether it be using modern, nonpolluting heating technology, providing adequate

recycling facilities, insuring that adequate open space is part of the project’s landscape, or that unique environmental features like streams or wetlands have been protected.

These measures generally add to the initial development cost of the project. But, as a matter of both sound economics and practical business experience, it is beyond serious dispute that in a surprisingly short period of time the extra capital costs of environmentally sustainable technologies and building techniques are more than repaid by the operating cost savings, in lower water bills and fuel costs, reduced costs of environmental compliance, and in more attractive developments that sell for higher prices or produce more social benefit. Thus, a critical role for the Chinese planning profession will be to document both the short term and long term costs of sustainable development and insure that they are recognized and used to guide development planning.

China’s national government has recognized the value of such practices in decisions such as its commitment to a “Green Olympics.” If the Chinese planning profession makes green buildings and green development its norm, it will by that measure alone make an enormous

contribution to the achieving sustainable development in China.

Finally, as China's cities expand and spread outward, China's planners have a particularly critical task if China is to have a sustainable future. They must use their special skills in land and urban planning to be the guardians of density and regional connection and ensure that, as China uses its growing wealth to create more attractive forms of urban life, that the new patterns of urban and suburban growth that emerge are compatible with a sustainable future.

As the pace of urban development in China accelerates, China’s cities and provinces are considering new developments of massive scope, in one case of at least 300,000 new residents. When one considers the scale of these new developments in combination with the

transformation of China's traditional urban cities and the spread of industrial parks across China's landscape, then it becomes apparent that China is building an entirely new urban future. It is an exercise in urbanization without precedent in human history. If, in this decade, for the first time in human history, a majority of the world's population lives in cities, than much of that is due to the urbanization of China.

China has traditionally had some of the highest urban densities in the world. Beijing for example in 1990 was five times as dense as New York. In the last fifteen years, however, Beijing, Shanghai, and other major Chinese cities have sought to replace much of the poverty shaped housing of the past with new development and to lower overall densities of the traditional urban core areas. China is also dispersing outward many economic activities that have traditionally been located in its core cities.

Many new Chinese developments have been sophisticated and attractive, and have used the flexibility of moving to the urban perimeter to great advantage. But what is the pattern? What are the planning issues that must be addressed if China's future urban landscapes are to be environmentally sustainable?

One critical benchmark is that communities whose density is too low cannot effectively be served by any form of transportation except the automobile. In American and European experience, that push point is about 18 families per hectare, the minimum density at which light rail transit becomes viable. Of course, many communities with densities below that have bus service. However, in low density landscapes, roads rapidly become congested and bus service becomes increasingly inefficient and, because of its very slow travel time, not an attractive alternative to using cars. Thus, in low density landscapes, bus service does not provide an alternative to car use, but ultimately becomes the province of those who don’t own a car or can’t use one (i.e. children, the elderly or those who cannot afford a car).

This makes the location of work sites critical. If there are no good transit connections between work and residential sites, low density becomes a problem far more rapidly. Ideally, work sites are concentrated and within walking or biking distance of a large portion of potential workers. If not, they should have direct transit connections to them. Low density development combined with dispersed work sites makes for a car dependent environment.

The planning challenge therefore is to gain the benefits of suburban dispersion while maintaining a transit viable network of urban communities. This must involve three levels of spatial integration, local, urban and regional. It involves thinking about residential communities in relation to all three, and it involves thinking about work locations in relation to all three. And it must involve the most careful and innovative design so that desirable urban densities remain vibrant and appealing communities.

Similarly, in addressing density issues, planners must remember that the more dispersed a landscape, the more it costs per family to provide the infrastructure and environmental resources required to manage modern urban life and meet modern environmental standards. Put another way, cut the density in half and there are only half as many families to pay for the water and sewage infrastructure, support the local government, pay to maintain the roads and pick up the garbage. At some point, the landscape becomes too diffuse to affordably support modern urban life without massive external government subsidies that can only be drawn from other population centers.

Density decisions will therefore determine whether China will have an environmentally affordable urban landscape, and whether it can avoid having an auto dependent one. It must be stressed that major expansion of China's urban areas and suburban fringes is inevitable, given the expected population increases in Chinese cities over the next thirty years. As noted elsewhere, thirty years from how, China's cities will occupy three to five times the area they do today. But, will they be planned for sustainability, with enough design and planning creativity to be attractive while maintaining sufficient densities and regional linkages to be affordable and to have a transit based travel system, one that allows automobiles to be utilized more selectively and sustain ably. Or will the allure of the car and the demand for new urban space create an uncontrolled pattern of suburban fringe development that will leave China three decades from now with an unsustainable landscape and a travel paralyzing 400 million cars all trying to use its roads daily, creating mind-numbing congestion and pollution in the process.

The next twenty to thirty years will shape China’s future as a rich and urban society. China will be investing its first generation of wealth in ways that, if successful, will fulfill Chairman Deng’s injunction that it is glorious to get rich. But China will not get rich, or more importantly stay rich, if its accumulating wealth is matched step for step with accumulating environmental losses. If China is to meet the challenge of sustainability, of conducting future economic growth in harmony with its environmental needs and limitations, then it must move from reactive to proactive environmental strategies, from single dimension to multi-dimensional environmental solutions, and to concentration on the key issues such as the future of the auto and the density of future urban development that will determine its future sustainability.

These are questions that will especially require the skills of China's planners to answer successfully. China must bring to bear upon them the same dynamic energy and creativity that in the last quarter century it has brought to bear on the problem of economic development. China at this moment is the world's most challenging and therefore the world's most exciting planning environment. The Chinese people have much of their future prosperity and well-being dependent upon the ability of their planners and leaders to first understand and then meet the challenge of environmental sustainability. If it has been glorious to get rich, then it will be even more glorious to stay rich and get richer. That will be the glory of a sustainable economy, the glory that China's planners have a critical role in winning.