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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I am not going to write anything today because you must read this article from Caijing Magazine: Heavy Metal Warfare.  It covers the smelting industry along the Xiang river in Hunan province 1 the , and in the process provides a telling picture of the challenges faced by Chinese environmental regulators across the vast rural [...]

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There have been two “firsts” recently reported in the  China environmental litigation arena.  It is easy to get the two cases confused because the plaintiff in both is the All-China Environmental Federation (ACEF).
The ACEF is listed on the Ministry of Environmental Protection’s website as an “affiliated social organization” It was established on April 22, 2005 and [...]

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As China Daily is reporting, you can now get “realtime” (it’s updated every four hours) information about the quality of water in some of China’s major rivers and lakes online.  The results show pH level and concentrations of dissolved oxygen (DO), total organic carbon (TOC), and chemical oxygen demand (COD).  When I tried it out, [...]

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The Good
During the first six months of 2009, Beijing experienced its best air in a decade.  Although just how good Beijing’s air is in an absolute sense remains in dispute (for all things Beijing Air, your indispensable source is livefrombeijing), there seems little reason to doubt that air quality has improved on a relative basis [...]

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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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You may recall that last week we said we had a reporter stationed outside the Chengjiang County courthouse ‘round the clock waiting to bring you news of the verdict in the criminal trial of Yunnan Chengjiang Jinye Corporation for polluting Yangzonghai Lake with arsenic.  It pains me to confess to our loyal readers that we [...]

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Premier Wen apparently announced the 2008 numbers for Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) discharges and Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) emissions reductions in his address to the National People’s Congress.  If these numbers had been released previously, I missed them.  You may recall that the 11th Five Year Plan calls for a 10% reduction in COD and SO2 [...]

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