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 were halted. In February 2006, ten construction
projects, with a total of 29 billion yuan of investment, were investigated and
dealt with for not simultaneously designing, constructing and putting into use
relevant environmental protection facilities.
The state environmental protection authorities have listed Inner Mongolia,
Xinjiang, Guangxi, Dalian and Wuhan, the railway and petrochemical industries,
the planning of the Ningxia Ningdong Coal Chemical Industry Base and that of the
Shanghai urban rail transportation network as the first pilots of EIA practice
in the field of construction planning. The authorities have also completed the
EIA work regarding the Special Plan on the Integrated Construction of the
National Forestry and Paper-making Industry, conducted EIA work regarding the
development and utilization planning of the Tarim River valley, the middle and
lower reaches of the Lancang River, the Dadu River in Sichuan, the upper reaches
of the Yalong River, and the Yuanshui River valley. When applying EIA to the
Nujiang River valley hydropower development plan, comparisons were made
regarding the environmental impact to be caused by the layout, scale, ways and
sequence of time at different steps of the development plans, and measures were
suggested to prevent and reduce the possible impact. The EIA of the stepped
hydropower development plan of the Dadu River valley had taken into full
consideration the coordination between environment and development, and made
comprehensive arrangements for protection of the environment in the valley where
resources exploitation would be carried out, by which arrangements a total of
backwater distance of 39 km, 1,867 ha of arable land and two county seats were
saved from being submerged, and consequently 85,000 people no longer had to be
relocated. The State encourages orderly exploitation of hydropower resources,
and has reset the energy development strategy and the electricity development
principle from "actively developing" to "orderly developing" hydropower based on
ecological protection.
