China's ecological civilization garners global influence

China's concept of ecological civilization, while guiding the country to make remarkable environmental improvements, has increasingly garnered global influence, with a project featuring Western scholars focusing on studying the concept at Oxford University in the pipeline.

James Thornton, founder of ClientEarth, an environmental law organization and professor of Oxford University Smith School, disclosed his plan to set up the project in an interview with China Daily on the sidelines of the Eco Forum Global Guiyang 2025, a two-day event that concluded on Sunday in Guiyang, capital of Southwest China's Guizhou province.

"China's concept of an ecological civilization is the most advanced globally of any approach for humans living harmoniously with the planet," Thornton emphasized.

The environmental movement over the last 50 years has been discussing how mankind can live in harmony with nature. It's the concept of ecological civilization, which brings all of the relevant aspects of this living harmoniously together, he said.

He said in the West, very few people yet understand the advance that China has made with this concept and the practice.

"We see in the Western press, individual stories about electric vehicles, or about solar panels or high-speed transit in China. But what is not understood even by the most advanced commentators in the Financial Times, in the Economist, is that this is all part of an overarching synergistic view which the Chinese have, which is what I think is likely to save human civilization, not just Chinese civilization," he stressed.

Visiting China frequently since his first visit 12 years ago, Thornton said he has watched how China has actually taken this conceptual framework and turned it into reality.

"And that's the hard part. It's relatively easy to come up with ideas. Taking those ideas and making them real is the hard part, and China has done very well. And every time I come back, I see progress," he said.

In his visit to China this time, he has found himself marveling that "a tremendous amount has already been implemented to protect and restore the Yangtze River basin".

So much of the Chinese population has lived in the Yangtze River basin for 1,000 years. Therefore, it had suffered a great deal of environmental problems, but it is being restored and very successfully, he noted.

If the Yangtze River basin can be restored, then anywhere in the world can be restored, he stressed.

Thornton further stressed the global significance of China's endeavor to promote ecological civilization, saying that both theoretical and practical advances China has made in ecological civilization are now vital for the rest of the world to learn.

"I see it as the best hope for human beings, human civilization to survive and prosper in this era of climate change, so as to reduce the impacts of climate change, reduce the impacts of biodiversity loss and come up with a way of having an advanced civilization which can live in harmony," he said.

"So the rest of the world honestly is behind China. I'm an expert on what the West is doing as well. And the West is definitely behind both in theory and in practice," he added.

He said he has recently taken on a new role as a professor at Oxford University, and what he has been doing in his new role is to "set up a project at Oxford, where western scholars focus on studying ecological civilization".

"For many years, Chinese scholars have opened their eyes to what's going on in the west and brought the advances from the west back to China with Chinese characteristics," he said. "Now I would like to make that mutual and have Western scholars study ecological civilization and then bring it into the West with Western characters".