China's first environmentally oriented elementary school, with environmental protection at the top of its teaching agenda, will be set up in Yan'an, a city in northwestern Shaanxi Province, which is known as the "Red Capital" and was the seat of the headquarters of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in the 1930s-40s.

The school, dubbed as "Unilever Environmental Protection Hope Primary School," will be built with 200,000 yuan donated by Unilever (China) Ltd., the Chinese branch of the well-known international company, Unilever, and with textbooks on environmental protection provided by the publicity and education center of the State Environmental Protection Administration.

The school, which will be located in Yanchang County, is part of the company's five-year environment program, "Unilever Environmental Protection Initiative -- Clean Water and Green Mountains for China," which was launched in June 2000. The school is the eighth Hope school funded by Unilever and the other seven are located in Qinghai Province in northwest China.

Meanwhile, Unilever (China) has donated another 580,000 yuan to fund a local aerial tree-planting program to cover 6,666 hectares. Yan'an is second in the area for the company to carry out its aerial tree-planting program in the country, which covers a total of 13,000 hectares, one-thousandth of the country's total in 2001.

Unilever (China) is the first company to fund an aerial afforestation program in the country, according to the China Green Foundation. Over the past decades, the mountainous Yan'an area has increased its green coverage to 42.9 percent, the sources said.

(People's Daily 07/04/2001)