Supervision body on natural resources to be built

China is expected to establish a new government organ in an effort to better protect natural resources, including minerals, water and forests, said a senior official.

The establishment of a State-owned assets supervision and administration body on natural resources is still being mulled, said Yang Weimin, deputy director of the Office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs，China's top economic decision-making body, during a keynote speech at a forum in East China's Zhejiang province, yicai.com reported on Monday.

The move is aimed at pushing forward the ecological civilization construction, a concept highlighted at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee at the end of 2013.

The new government body will be built to carry out the duty as an owner of national natural resources, Yang said, adding that natural resources ownership is the basis of the ecological civilization construction system, which is not defined clearly now in China.

The development and protection of natural resources will also top the agenda after natural resources ownership is affirmed. "There must be a department endowed with centralized power to control the use of the natural ecological space," Yang said.

The unified ecosystem is vulnerable under the current administrative system in China, which allocates supervision power to different departments according to the classification of the natural resource types.