China Environmental Law

Greenpeace issued a report several weeks ago, during my hiatus, that I have just had an opportunity to review.  Poisoning the Pearl is based on the results of wastewater samples conducted by Greenpeace investigators of several facilities operating in the Pearl River Delta.  The results were discouraging, but predictable.

All the facilities sampled were found [...]

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You may have read about the water contamination case in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province.  If not, Greenlaw and New Energy and Environment Digest (NEED) have good summaries.  NEED states that
An estimated one million of the city’s 1.5 million residents were left without water due to what government identified as the presence of two variants of carbolic [...]

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We’ve about reached our pontification limit for the week here at CELB, so will avoid in depth analysis today and give you a quick tour of a few other China environmental stories making the headlines.
Environmental Protests
More than 1,000 residents in Zhentou, Hunan Province, “demonstrated outside local government headquarters and a police station, demanding greater compensation [...]

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The Ministry of Environmental Protection released the English summary of its “State of the Environment” report earlier this month.  We have read it so you won’t have to.
Let’s first look at the ten achievements identified for 2008.  Where interesting facts and figures were given, we have noted them.

First, the CPC Central Committee and the State [...]

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I applaud China’s willingness to publish the results of environmental and energy audits when the results do not paint a pretty picture.  The National Audit Office (NAO) yesterday released a report containing the results of its audit of the compliance efforts of 41 major state-owned enterprises (SOE) in 2007.  It found that a number of [...]

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China Daily reported yesterday that random inspections by the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) in February revealed the following:

about 15.5% of projects started construction without approval (I assume this means that they either did not conduct an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) or their EIA was not approved);
about 9.6 %of enterprises closed for environmental reasons resumed [...]

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Xinhua reports that “15,000 enterprises were punished for pollution last year and nearly 100 people deemed responsible were disciplined.”  Without more information, these numbers are hard to put into context.  The original Chinese version doesn’t provide much additional information, however it (立案查处1.5万家环境违法企业) suggests that 15,000 enterprises in violation of environmental laws were investigated last year, but [...]

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