SHANGHAI, Aug. 21 -- CHINA said stock sales for power stations, smelters and cement plants will require the approval of the environmental agency as the nation seeks to cut pollution.

Share sales of potentially polluting projects will need the approval of the State Environmental Protection Administration, the government said in a statement on its Website. Under previous rulings, only coal-fired power plants required approvals from the state agency, Bloomberg News reported.

China, the world's second-biggest oil user after the United States, has asked domestic banks to curb loans to energy-intensive industries to cut waste and improve the environment.

About one-third of China's lakes, rivers and coastal waters are polluted because of farming and industrial waste and pose a threat to human health, the Organization for Economic Cooperation said in a July report.

"We will assess the environmental performance of those companies and their subsidiaries and provide suggestions to the China Securities Regulatory Commission," the environmental agency said in the statement.

The government has added 10 billion yuan (US$1.3 billion) to an 11.3-billion-yuan budget for energy conservation, the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planning agency, said on July 27. China has set a target to cut the amount of energy consumed for each unit of gross domestic product by 20 percent in the five years ending 2010. The government is under "very heavy pressure" to meet targets for reducing the amount of energy used to drive the fastest-growing major economy, Xie Fuzhan, head of the National Bureau of Statistics, said in July.

China's biggest banks cut loans to energy-intensive projects by 34 percent from a year earlier during the first five months of 2007, the China Banking Regulatory Commission said on July 13.