Planning environmental impact assessment law in China: Status quo, implementation problems and legislative reform

Abstract

As the primary form of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) mandated by law in China, the planning environmental impact assessment (PEIA) serves to anticipate the likely environmental impacts that may arise out of the proposed plans. In this research, systematic reviews of local practice and major reforms of the PEIA system were conducted to have a comprehensive understanding of the implementation of the PEIA system, so as to clarify the direction and focus of PEIA lawmaking. PEIA documents issued by local governments in China since 2010 were collected to find the development and breakthrough of PEIA laws in local practice. Major reforms of the planning system and environmental governance system in recent years were also examined to find the outdated premises of PEIA laws. The results showed that today the PEIA laws face multiple problems in implementation, including the exclusion of policy EIA, outdated screening and scoping requirements, insufficient guarantee for quality of the review procedure, limited public participation and information disclosure, confusing circumstances for initiating follow-up assessment, and invalid legal liability for participants of the EIA process. To solve these problems through legislative reform, this paper suggests amending the Environmental Impact Assessment Law to extend planning EIA to policy EIA, update the screening and scoping requirements, adjust procedures for review of EIA documents, strengthen public participation and supervision, specify procedures for follow-up assessments, and improve legal liability for violating PEIA obligations.