On 18 September, Mr. Zhao Yingmin, Vice Minister of Environmental Protection indicated on the 10th International Workshop of Regional Air Quality Management that problems such as extensive management, excessive emission of pollutants and illegal emission exist in China’s environmental management, and China will improve emission license system through reforms so as to comprehensively promote and improve the various systems related to environmental protection.
On the specific reform route, Mr. Zhao Yingmin proposed the fixed source environmental management system with the establishment of emission license system as the core, develop management catalogue, realize the comprehensive coverage of emission license, incorporate gradually solid waste and noise into emission license management accordingly to law. According to experts who did analysis, this means that the EIA system which has been implemented for many years will be weakened, the emission license core system has been set by the Ministry of Environmental Protection as the future new direction for environmental management.
Since last year, the reform in EIA system has started in discretion. Feng Jia, the associated prof. of Wang Jian school of law of Suzhou University said that at the beginning of last year, the State Council issued document defining that except marine and key project EIA, EIA of other projects are replaced by post project approval, this shows the reduced role of EIA in China. In recent days, many experts also confirmed that the “tough” EIA system will be gradually simplified to achieve the aim of efficient environmental management system with reduced cost.
Xia Guang, the Director General of Environmental and Economic Policy Research Center of MEP said, the reform in environmental management system in China is to improve efficiency and reduce cost, therefore, EIA needs to be simplified and to remove the functions that should not belong to it, so that EIA becomes a voluntary action of the enterprises, and government no longer approves EIA.
（Source： World Environment (China Environment Media)）
