China's environmental watchdog admitted Monday the country had failed to reach any of its pollution control goals for 2006 and had fallen further behind as the economy picked up speed.

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The State Environmental Protection Agency said the faster-than-expected economic growth meant that sulfur dioxide emissions increased by nearly 463,000 tons, or 1.8 percent, over the previous year, according to a report on its Web site.

Chemical oxygen demand, a water pollution index, also rose by 1.2 percent over 2005, the report said.

China had set a goal of cutting the emission of major pollutants by 10 percent in the five years to 2010, with the two main pollutants to be reduced by 2 percent in 2006, the first year of the plan.

Gross domestic product grew 10.7 percent in 2006, 3.2 percentage points higher than first forecast, SEPA director Zhou Shengxian said on the Web site.

"Economic growth is still excessive ... and there is slow progress in restructuring obsolete and backward production capacity," Zhou said.

He also said that investment in projects to prevent water pollution had not been made and that environmental laws are weak and ineffectively enforced.

The government says all of China's major rivers are dangerously polluted, with millions of people lacking access to clean drinking water.

A pollution accident happened nearly every two days in China last year, with authorities receiving 600,000 environmental complaints, according to state media.

China also had planned to cut the amount of energy required to produce a unit of GDP by 20 percent by 2010, but it has not said yet if those targets were met in 2006.

Sulfur dioxide emissions are chiefly caused by coal burning, and China is already the world's largest producer and consumer of coal, depending heavily on coal-fired power plants for electricity.

Most of the country's hundreds of power plants lack up-to-date pollution controls and are a major source of smog.