This year marks the 20th anniversary of the proposition that “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets.” Reported from the event dedicating to the 2025 National Ecology Day held in Zhijiang on August 15, Huaihua has steadfastly implemented this concept in recent years, embedding ecological priority and green development throughout its economic and social progress. Taking its designation as one of the country’s first pilot cities for mechanisms to realize the value of ecological products as an opportunity, the city has actively explored pathways to monetize ecological products, promoted the conversion of ecological advantages into economic and social strengths, and formed a set of typical practices that can be promoted and replicated nationwide.
Deepening the conversion of the Two Mountains Theory to empower realization of ecological value
On July 29, 2025, Hunan Province’s first “state-owned construction land + VEP (value of ecological products) loan” was approved in Jingzhou County, with an ecological-value credit line of 11 million yuan.
The “state-owned construction land + VEP loan” involves Jingzhou Rural Commercial Bank extending a 30 million-yuan development loan to a real estate developer for project construction, of which the ecological-value portion is allocated for ecological restoration and related expenditures. By turning ecological product value into financing credit, this mechanism helps solve the difficulty of using ecological assets as collateral.
In recent years, Huaihua has actively explored pathways to put the Two Mountains Theory into practice, concentrating on mechanisms to realize ecological product value as a key reform. The city has accelerated the conversion of ecological benefits into economic returns and charted a new development path that places ecology first and prioritizes green growth.
Efforts have been made to monitor and confirm ecological products. Huaihua has improved its investigation and monitoring system for ecological products, conducting comprehensive surveys of fundamental ecological-product information for forests, grasslands, wetlands, and water bodies, and rapidly and accurately monitoring carbon stocks. The city took the lead in the province in issuing the Implementation Plan for Registration and Update of Forest Rights Confirmation and the Measures for Confirmation and Registration of Water-area Operating Rights, pioneering practices such as the three-layer separation and stacking of rights for the above-ground, land surface, and underground layers of forests, and establishing mechanisms to realize the value of water-related ecological products. It promoted unified confirmation and registration of operating rights for 33 reservoirs, 686 kilometers of cross-basin rivers, and 21 state-owned forest farms across the city.
Huaihua has established an interdepartmental collaborative accounting mechanism and carried out GEP accounting to set the prices of ecological products with the national platform for accounting total ecosystem product value. The city has set up an ecological-product value evaluation mechanism and performed VEP accounting for specific territorial units, completing the province’s first “state-owned construction land + VEP” natural resource asset portfolio project and closing the province’s first VEP transaction for ecological products for soil and water conservation.
Huaihua has advanced innovation in green finance reform. It drafted the Three-year Action Plan (2025–2027) for Financial Support of Pilot Mechanisms to Realize the Value of Ecological Products, promoted the model of “mortgaging ecological-asset equity + project”, and piloted pledge-based financing using environmental rights and interests such as forest tenure, pollutant discharge rights, carbon emission rights, water-extraction rights, and green power certificates. In May 2025, the city was approved as the province’s pilot city for pledge-based financing using environmental rights and interests. Huaihua introduced 56 green lending products including forest-rights loans, forest-benefit loans, carbon-sink loans, and water-extraction loans. By the first half of 2025, the city’s green finance loan balance reached 41.56 billion yuan, up 6.78% year on year.
Rolling out measures to strengthen the green shield
Huaihua has actively pursued the concept of green development, pressing forward the tough battle against pollution and achieving notable results in defending blue skies, clear waters and clean soil; ecological‑civilization construction has accelerated, laying a firmer green foundation for high‑quality development.
For five consecutive years Huaihua’s ambient air quality has met the national standard of Grade II, with the city topping the province in both average PM2.5 concentration and the magnitude of improvement. Public satisfaction with the ecological environment reached an outstanding 96.64%, ranking first in the province for three straight years; the city’s pollution‑control campaign has been rated “excellent” at the provincial level for two consecutive years, and efforts such as standardized hazardous‑waste management and enterprise self‑monitoring remain in the province’s leading tier. Ecosystem protection and restoration have been comprehensively strengthened and biodiversity has increasingly flourished: 77 nationally key protected wild animal species and 97 nationally key protected wild plant species reproduce and thrive here, and the project “substantive breakthrough in protecting the Xianghua dace was selected among the nation’s top ten biodiversity‑conservation cases.
Working in an integrated city‑and‑county fashion, Huaihua has coordinated the creation of ecological civilization demonstration sites across counties/districts. Tongdao, Hecheng, Xinhuang, Yuanling and Zhijiang were named national demonstration zones for ecological civilization; Jingzhou was designated an innovation base for practicing the Two Mountains Theory; all 13 counties and districts under the administration of the city were named provincial‑level ecological‑civilization demonstration zones, the highest total among prefectural cities in the province; and 49 townships and villages were named municipal‑level demonstration towns/villages.
In the first half of this year, Huaihua’s surface‑water environmental quality ranked first in the province and 22nd nationally.
Expanding green industries to gather new development momentum
At the Taohua Island camping base in Zhijiang, visitors can experience tent wedding or have a drink on tent bars, with supporting attractions such as a water park and a Dong drum tower, turning a former barren islet into a new showcase of integrated tourism development.
Pursuing both the industrialization of ecology and the ecologization of industry, Huaihua is building a modern green industrial system led by new quality productive forces, with green industries developing vigorously.
Relying on its advantage as one of the nation’s nine ecologically sound regions, Huaihua has strengthened construction of national key ecological‑function zones, established ecological compensation mechanisms for the Yuan River basin with Xiangxi Prefecture and Changde City, and set up intra‑city cross‑county/district watershed compensation mechanisms.
Focusing on featured fields such as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the bamboo industry, green foods and ecological cultural tourism, Huaihua has planned and reserved a number of key projects to realize ecological product value, established an integrated development model of “ecology + under‑forest economy + health & leisure + science education tour,” accelerated development of TCM, bamboo, modern seed industry and food industry chains, and pushed to create the regional agricultural brand “Huaixiang Huaipin”, turning ecological advantages into industrial advantages. In the first half of 2025, the output value of the TCM, bamboo, seed and green‑food industry chains rose by 18%, 51%, 8.3% and 7.5% respectively, while visitor arrivals and tourism revenue increased by 10.72% and 11.43%, showing that ecological resources have been converted into tangible economic gains.
(Translated by Yang Hong)