China Environmental Law

While trying to put together a more extensive China Environmental Scorecard I stumbled upon the official English translation of China’s 11th Five-year Plan for Environmental Protection (issued on November 22, 2007). It offers a refreshingly candid assessment of where China has been, where it is, and where it wants to go in terms of environmental protection. 

Environmental situation is still grave in China though with some positive development. . . .

There is no breakthrough in some in-depth environmental issues that should have been addressed during the “10th Five-Year Plan” period. There is no fundamental change in the inappropriate industrial structure and extensive economic growth mode. There are also such problems as environmental protection lagging behind economic growth, poor or inflexible mechanism, insufficient input and capacity. The phenomena of no strict observation of laws, little punishment to lawbreakers, poor law enforcement and supervision are still very common.

This is China’s environmental roadmap; if you want to know what China’s environmental priorities are, I suggest you read it, or you can wait until I decide to write further about.  Take your pick.

I’ve put it into a single document (you have to work through 6 individual pages on the SEPA (oops! I mean MEP) website to read the whole thing) and cleaned up the formatting. I’ve added it to “Laws & Regulations” in the right sidebar.