High-emission vehicles will be banned from driving in main areas of China's three key economic regions by the end of the year, according to a plan jointly released on Thursday by five ministries, including the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

The three regions are Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, Beijing News reported on Friday.

The plan outlined tasks for each provinces and cities.

The capital is required to remove 391,000 vehicles this year, while the numbers for Tianjin and Hebei province are 143,000 vehicles and 660,000 vehicles, respectively.

That means, a total of 1.194 million vehicles will be taken off the road in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region over the next three months.

That number is almost one fifth of the total 6 million high-emission vehicles that are to be taken off the nation's road by the end of the year, according to the 2014 Government Work Report released in March.

The plan targets huangbiaoche and old vehicles. Huangbiaoche, literally vehicles that are posted with yellow labels, refers to vehicles that cannot meet national emission standards.

They include gasoline-fueled vehicles that fail to meet the National I emission standard and diesel-powered vehicles that cannot meet the National III emission standard.

And old vehicles are all vehicles that cannot meet the National IV emission standard.

All main cities across the country will ban or restrict these high-emission vehicles by the end of June, 2015, the plan said.

It also urged local authorities to allocate subsidies for huangbiaoche owners who scrap their vehicles early, and encouraged financial institutions to provide supporting credit to the owners when they buy new vehicles.

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