cover story| Use publicity to stimulate endogenous motivation for environmental protection

In front of the big screen, learn about the monitoring work in urban air, water, sound, radiation and other fields; come to the sewage treatment plant, personally witness the sewage treatment process and have an in-depth understanding of the treatment technology behind it; Entering the waste electrical and electronic products treatment plant, I witnessed the waste electrical appliances being classified and dismantled step by step on the assembly line... As the work of opening environmental protection facilities to the public continues to advance, various activities with rich content have been held in various places to guide the public. Come closer to environmental protection facilities and continuously enhance environmental awareness and improve environmental literacy through seeing, hearing, and experience.

General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: "We must always adhere to the strictest system and the strictest rule of law to protect the ecological environment, maintain normalized external pressure, and at the same time stimulate the endogenous motivation of the whole society to jointly protect the ecological environment." Ecological civilization is a cause jointly built, shared and shared by all people, and everyone is a builder, protector and beneficiary. Promoting the opening of environmental protection facilities can enhance communication through openness, build consensus through transparency, and root the values of green, low-carbon, and ecological civilization deep in people's hearts, thereby continuously improving the environmental awareness and literacy of the whole society and inspiring the general public to jointly protect the ecological environment. Conscious of thought and action. In this regard, promoting the disclosure of environmental protection facilities can stimulate endogenous motivation from the bottom up and is of great significance to building an environmental governance system in which the whole society participates.

In recent years, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council have put forward specific requirements for environmental protection in the "Opinions on Comprehensively Strengthening Ecological and Environmental Protection and Resolutely Fighting the Battle of Pollution Prevention and Control","Opinions on Deepening the Battle of Pollution Prevention and Control" and "Opinions on Comprehensively Promoting the Construction of Beautiful China". The opening up of environmental protection facilities puts forward specific requirements and emphasizes deepening this work. As early as seven years ago, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (now the Ministry of Ecology and Environment) jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Opening of Environmental Protection Facilities and Urban Sewage and Waste Treatment Facilities to the Public" with the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, requiring environmental monitoring facilities, urban sewage treatment facilities, Four types of facilities, including urban domestic waste treatment facilities, hazardous waste and waste electrical and electronic products treatment facilities, are open to the public, and are gradually institutionalized, standardized, and normalized. Over the past seven years, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development have announced four batches of 2101 open units for environmental protection facilities, covering all cities at prefecture level and above across the country. As of the end of 2023, a total of more than 210 million visitors have been received online and offline.

Only by understanding can you pay attention, and only by paying attention can you gain trust and participation. Although environmental protection is closely related to daily life, there is a certain threshold for its professional knowledge, and the environmental protection treatment process is far away from life. Therefore, environmental protection has once become the "most familiar stranger" around people. For example, the siege of garbage is shocking. Smog and sewage can harm health. However, where does the garbage and sewage that people throw away every day end up and how to deal with it? How do air quality data come from? In response to the hot issues of concern to people, the disclosure of environmental protection facilities gives people the opportunity to see with their own eyes how many procedures domestic waste needs to go through and how much real money is invested to be "digested". This not only eliminates people's doubts, but also allows people to deeply feel the need to reduce waste, and then consciously classify waste in daily life. At the same time, after information flows fully, the problem of "avoiding neighbor" caused by information asymmetry will also be resolved invisible. It can be seen that opening environmental protection facilities directly and proactively to the public and protecting the people's rights to know, participate and supervise the environment can eliminate information barriers and knowledge thresholds, win trust and understanding in an open and transparent manner, and build consensus on environmental protection.

There are no substitutes for the ecological environment. It is not only related to the quality of economic development, but also to everyone's quality of life. The ecological environment has the characteristics of universal benefit and public nature, and it is difficult to rely on government departments or enterprises to fight alone. Instead, hundreds of millions of people need to join hands, work together and participate together to solve the problem of "ten thousand people are lost, one person is picked up" The free-riding dilemma and find the lowest-cost and most efficient environmental protection path. The disclosure of environmental protection facilities can expand the channels for the public to participate extensively in environmental protection and find specific realization carriers for everyone to do it, everyone to fulfill their responsibilities, and everyone to participate. For the public, the "immersive" process of visiting environmental protection facilities is itself a kind of social supervision, which can force government departments and enterprises to strengthen ecological and environmental governance, and the improvement of environmental protection knowledge and literacy can be transformed into voluntary participation in environmental protection. Action; for government departments, openly attracting the public to participate in environmental protection through environmental protection facilities can open up the "last mile" of ecological and environmental governance and enhance people's sense of ecological gain, happiness and security; For enterprises, allowing environmental protection facilities to operate under the supervision of ordinary people will help enterprises improve their environmental management levels, enhance their internal pollution control power, and gain an early lead and establish advantages in future market competition.

At present, the disclosure of environmental protection facilities has become a social consensus and has achieved remarkable results. Next, we should continue to work hard on "how to better disclose". An important purpose of holding on-site observation activities for opening environmental protection facilities to the public across the country is to summarize and exchange advanced experiences, practices and achievements in the opening of environmental protection facilities, and explore new ideas, new measures and new methods to promote the opening of facilities in the new era. By making full use of the enabling role of new generation digital technologies such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence in openness and interaction, innovating methods and methods, enriching content carriers, and promoting the disclosure of environmental protection facilities with greater efforts, we can further enhance the public's environmental literacy and participation to gather stronger environmental protection forces.

If ecology flourishes, civilization will prosper; if ecology declines, civilization will decline. The construction of ecological civilization is not only an important foundation for the Chinese nation to achieve sustainable development, but also an important symbol of the country's prosperity and development. Taking the disclosure of environmental protection facilities as the fulcrum, stimulating the positive initiative of the whole society to "I want to do", persevere and work hard for a long time, we will surely be able to do a good job in the construction of ecological civilization, making the sky bluer, the mountains greener, and the water clearer and the environment more beautiful.

Author's unit: People's Daily

This article comes from the cover story column of "World Environment" in 2024.02