Environmental impact assessment of projects in the People's Republic of China: new law, old problems

Emerging environmental Multi-Level Governance in China? Environmental protests, public participation and local institution-building

“…A multitude of authors have pointed out that the Chinese policy process suffers from the twin problem of an implementation gap and a participation gap. Problems with the implementation of legal requirements for public participation are well acknowledged and are caused by a range of partially interlinked factors including local government conservatism (e.g., beliefs that the public does not need to be consulted), fears that an enhanced role for the public might lead to a reversal of government decisions, and specific factors to do with the weak status of the local Environmental Protection Bureaus (EPBs), including a low staffing level and a lack of funding (Wang et al 2003;Ge et al 2009;Song et al 2011;Li et al 2012;Ren 2013). In all the high-profile campaigns mentioned above, formal public participation through institutionalized channels as stipulated in relevant laws took place only after significant protests by environmental campaigners.…”

Transition in public participation in Chinese water management

“…In terms of the 2002 EIA Law, there is no statutory requirement for full EIA reports to be made available to the public (Wang et al, 2003), especially before official approval by the relevant agencies. For example, the lake leakage prevention project started in September 2004, but it was not publicly known until March 2005.…”

“…One important feature of the European Union (EU) water framework directive, for example, is recognising the importance of developing effective mechanisms to support public and stakeholder participation in water planning and decision-making process at the river basin level (EU, 2000;Videira et al, 2006). Public participation has often been discussed in the context of environmental impact assessment (EIA) (Martens, 2006;Tang et al, 2005;Wang et al, 2003;Zhao, 2010) and social impact assessment (SIA) (Tang et al, 2008) in China. However, public influence on decision-making in the water sector is still limited in the context of Chinese EIA Law adopted in 2002 and other relevant regulations.…”

Partial replacement of river sand with volcanic pyroclastics as fine aggregates in concrete production

“…To mitigate this indiscriminate sand mining, initial environmental impact assessment (EIA) for resource extraction should be carried out followed by subsequent ones, as the growing demand renders the existing extraction capacity insufficient [10]. In such cases environmental impact assessment is not an effective tool to protect the environment because the subsequent EIA's gradually change the environment to a scale beyond that envisaged in any individual EIA [11]. This leads to the situation where multiple officially approved projects may have combined impacts, which are undesirable and beyond control of the applied planning and impact assessments instruments [10].…”