The upcoming June 5 is going to be the first World Environment Day since the enforcement of the new environment law in China. MEP released to the media today the Chinese theme of 2015 World Environment Day-“Live a Green Life”, which is designed to improve the environmental awareness, conservation awareness, and ecological awareness of the whole nation, help them adopt a low-carbon and conservation-oriented green lifestyle and consumption pattern, and create new social style in which ecological civilization is upheld by everyone, in every matter, and at any time, so as to lay a solid social and public foundation for the development of ecological civilization.
The “Opinions on Accelerating the Promotion of Ecological Civilization”, which was adopted by the CPC Central Committee, proposed to facilitate the green transition of lifestyle and achieve the transition of lifestyle and consumption pattern towards diligent and thrift, green and low-carbon, culturally advanced and healthy directions. Moreover, the new environment protection law stipulated that “citizens shall enhance the environmental awareness, adopt a low-carbon and conservation-oriented lifestyle, and be self-conscious to fulfill the environmental protection obligations”. To promote green transition of lifestyle is one of the important moves to incorporate the development of ecological civilization into the promotion of economic, political, cultural, and social progress. For the moment, China is in an accelerated industrialization and urbanization process, with significant improvement of material conditions, some of the bad lifestyles and consumption behaviors in daily life have caused increasingly serious resource wasting and environmental damages, which has fueled the behaviors of keeping up with the Joneses, showing-off, and extravagance, at the cost of more intensive consumption of resources and energy, and extra emission of GHGs. The resulted environmental problems have become bottlenecks in our effort to build a moderately prosperous society in all respects. Therefore, it has become a pressing mission to advocate diligent and thrift, green and low-carbon, culturally advanced and healthy lifestyle and consumption pattern, and vigorously promote the green transition of consumption notions and lifestyle. To this end, we should enable people to make green choices when it comes to their clothing, diet, housing, and commute, balance and promote multiple aspects including change of consumption ideas, development of policies and institutions, promotion of whole nation campaign, and improvement of matching measures, and establish a long-term mechanism with government leadership, market response, public participation, and coordination and joint actions. In the meantime, we should promote green transition of lifestyles.
The theme of this year’s World Environment Day is identified as “live a green life” in order to, through the intensive publicity on the World Environment Day, disseminate and carry forward the notion of “green lifestyle”, improve people’s understanding of this notion, and translate it into real actions; call for everyone to take their actions, do their own part and with small things to reduce the excessive consumption, show-off consumption, extravagant consumption and wasting, and achieve the transition towards diligent and thrift, green and low-carbon, culturally advanced and healthy lifestyles and consumption pattern. The Chinese theme also echoes the international theme identified by UNEP for this day, generating a resultant force for publicity purposes.
It is learned that the international theme for this year’s World Environment Day is “Sustainable Consumption and Production”, and the slogan is “Seven Billion Dreams: One Planet, Consume with Care”.
MEP is planning to hold a series of publicity and commemorative activities during this event. Local areas will also conduct colorful activities around this year’s theme, gather the forces of the entire society, and make greater contributions to advancing ecological civilization and environmental protection.
MINISTRY OF ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT 
