White paper on environmental protection
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2006-06-05 10:26 VIII. Environmental Impact
Assessment Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a legal measure to curb
environmental pollution and ecological destruction at the source. In 1998, the
Chinese government promulgated the Regulations on Environmental Management of
Construction Projects, which put forth the idea of environmental impact
assessment, and required construction projects to design, construct and put into
use relevant environmental protection facilities along with the progress of the
project itself ("three simultaneousnesses" for short). The Law of the People's
Republic of China on Environmental Impact Assessment, which came into effect in
2003, extends the EIA practice from construction projects to all development
construction plans. The State has also adopted the EIA engineer professional
qualification certification system to foster a contingent of professional
technicians in this field. EIA is practiced in 1.46 million construction
projects nationwide, and 630,000 new projects have met the requirements of
designing, constructing and putting into use relevant environmental protection
facilities, with the implementation ratio being 99.3 percent and 96.4 percent,
respectively, 95.7 percent of the latter has reached the set standards. Since
1996, a total of 26,998 billion yuan has gone into construction projects across
the country, of which the input for environmental protection amounts to 1,230.6
billion yuan, and the amount keeps rising year by year. Thanks to the
implementation of the EIA system, industrial projects are reporting "increase in
output instead of pollution" or "increase in output with decrease in pollution,"
and some ecological projects involving major environmentally sensitive issues
have avoided potential ecological damage by making changes to the site, route or
plan. In 2005, 30 illegal construction projects involving a total of 117.94
billion yuan of investment.
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