A reform plan covering the management system for various natural resources—including land, minerals, forests, grasslands, wetlands, water, and oceans—was officially released by the General Offices of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council. Titled "Guidelines on Improving the Natural Resource Asset Management System," the document was agreed upon by the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on July 4, 2026, aiming to unify the exercise of ownership rights over all natural resource assets owned by the whole people and promote safe, efficient, sustainable use and value preservation.
The guidelines set phased targets. By 2030, the natural resource asset management system is to be more robust, with clearer responsibilities, better asset inventories, stronger overall protection, more efficient allocation, and improved assessment and supervision. By 2035, a complete and well-functioning management system is to be fully established, with management capabilities significantly enhanced.
To clarify the asset base, the guidelines call for improving the unified survey, monitoring, and evaluation system covering land, minerals, forests, grasslands, wetlands, water, oceans, deserts, and national parks, and accelerating digital transformation of survey and monitoring. They also require refining asset inventory, statistics, and accounting systems, conducting regular asset inventories to ascertain physical quantities and explore value accounting, establishing an annual update mechanism, and improving the compilation of natural resource balance sheets.
Regarding property rights, the guidelines mandate legally establishing and protecting usage rights, promoting separation of ownership and usage rights, exploring separate establishment of subsurface land use rights, promoting state-owned agricultural land use rights, improving the conversion mechanism from sea area usage rights to land use rights after land reclamation, building a rights system for uninhabited islands, and advancing water rights reform. They also push for unified registration of natural resources and real estate to clarify ownership subjects and boundaries, and to consolidate unified real estate registration achievements.
For enhanced overall protection, the guidelines promote value preservation and appreciation of natural resource assets by strictly observing red lines for cultivated land and permanent basic farmland protection, enforcing ecological protection red lines, strictly controlling urban development boundaries, and promoting mixed land development and composite space utilization. The reserve management mechanism is to be optimized by including all state-owned construction land with undetermined usage rights into reserve management, exploring comprehensive reserving of natural resource assets, and allowing professional operators to undertake management tasks.
On efficient allocation, the guidelines call for deepening the reform of paid use, establishing and improving allocation rules such as grants, assignments, leases, and capital contributions, fully promoting competitive mineral rights transfers, gradually increasing market-based allocation of sea area usage rights, and fostering water rights trading markets. A new allocation model is to be constructed by exploring the formulation of natural resource asset allocation plans and implementing bundled allocation of multi-factor assets within specific territorial spaces, with asset allocation contracts publicly announced.
In terms of supervision and assessment, the guidelines establish a unified revenue management system for state-owned natural resource assets, requiring all related revenues to be included in government budgets and improving revenue and cost accounting. They also mandate the preparation of ownership resource lists, strengthen whole-process supervision, carry out comprehensive management responsibility assessments, leverage national natural resource supervision, explore a damage compensation mechanism for state-owned assets, improve reporting mechanisms to people's congresses at the same level, and publicly disclose asset status for public oversight.
For implementation, the guidelines emphasize unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee, with overall responsibility at the provincial level and detailed implementation at city and county levels. All regions and relevant departments are required to coordinate closely, enhance risk prevention, improve legislation, law enforcement, and judicial processes, boost technological support and information sharing, guide financial institutions to increase green finance support, and encourage local governments to conduct differentiated reform experiments. The Ministry of Natural Resources, in collaboration with relevant departments, will address emerging issues during implementation and report major matters to the CPC Central Committee and the State Council.