With its land and water resources largely ruined and air quality that puts six Chinese cities among the world's top 10 most polluted, experts warn that China requires urgent action if wants to limit the damage.

"The question is can China learn from Western society's mistakes," said Ma Lie, a senior consultant at environmental consultancy ERW Shanghai.

At its current pace, China faces a clean up bill that experts at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimate at 450 billion dollars -- equal to an astounding 15 percent of today's economy.

To put it another way, China's economic expansion of 9.5 percent last year would be cut by two percentage points if the cost of the country's growth on its environment and natural resources was included.

State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) vice-director Pan Yue said that more than 15 million mainland Chinese annually suffer respiratory problems, while another two million die from cancer.

Health costs are hard to calculate but they likely come into the billions of dollars, experts say.

In one district of Beijing, where producer Capital Steel is based, the death rate from lung cancer is on average 30 percent higher than in other parts of the capital, Yue said in a 21st Century Journal editorial.

With such daunting problems expected to only get worse, the central leadership is beginning to listen to conservationist warnings about the environment's woeful state and the need for sustainable growth models.

"(Environmental) work has been intensified, measures are getting tougher and the government is getting serious about the work of environmental protection," said Huo Daishan, founder of the Huai River Guard, an NGO set up to prevent further contamination of the mighty Yellow River.

In one example of this new found commitment, China's parliament last week passed its first ever renewable energy law which requires power grid operators to purchase resources from registered renewable energy producers.

Because China currently relies on polluting coal for about 75 percent of its energy needs, the aim is to build up non-fossil energy sources such as wind, solar and thermal power.

The hope is that these sources will account for 10 percent of the nation's total installed electricity capacity by 2010.

However, the law, which has been applauded by Greenpeace and takes effect next January, needs more teeth, said Gan Liu, WWF Energy and Climate Change Programme Director in China.

"It need policies to make the law operational. As it stands currently it is only a framework," said Gan. "The law is not specific enough."

At the same time, China wants to ensure that its economy continues to boom and like other developing countries, competing interests are at stake.

All too often government decisions to cancel or suspend projects are quickly overturned, such as when SEPA ordered a halt to 30 massive construction projects in January for failing to file environmental impact statements.

"Now it seems likely most of those projects will resume construction," said ERW Shanghai's Ma.

Although all developing economies face this issue, in China political and historical reasons make the implementation of Beijing's laws or decrees particularly tough.

For one, Beijing has to try and change the mentality of provincial officials, who, vying for promotion, are eager to show off their management prowess by presiding over strong economic growth on their watch.

"It's not wrong that local authorities want to develop the economy but they should realize that there will be irreconcilable contradictions if they do things blindly," said Guo Jing, project executive of Green Watershed, an environmental NGO in southwest Yunnan province.

And when the government is to blame, which most residents feel is often, they cannot protest in the streets without brushing up against the law.

"In China you can't act like Greenpeace, taking to the streets, rising your fist and protesting -- the hardline doesn't work in China," said Guo.

"What we can do is bring different parties into fair dialogues, make the government hear different voices and make its decisions include an assessment of the environmental impact," she said.

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