China's top environmental protection official has pledged to
block construction projects that fail to pass stringent
environmental impact assessments.
Zhou Shengxian, director of the State Environmental Protection
Administration (SEPA), said on Friday that environmental impact
assessments will set?standard and no development project which
damages the environment will get approval.
Zhou told a national meeting on the management of environmental
impact evaluation in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, that
environmentally-damaging activities were occurring
nationwide.????
"Some areas have disregard the public's living environment and
launched development projects in a blind and chaotic way," said
Zhou. "A number of projects that have produced serious pollution
and damaged the ecology have even been cited as image
projects."
Environmental degradation continued and environmental problems
had become a problem in China's social and economic development, he
said.
He said properly conducted environmental impact assessments were
the key to change the appalling situation in the country's
environmental protection.
Zhou had asked environmental protection workers to be strict in
examining and approving construction projects and to be stringent
in inspections, while maintaining efficiency, openness and
transparency.
China has 68 organizations specializing in environmental impact
assessments.
Environmental protection officials had evaluated 55,000
construction projects in the last two years, and had denied
approval for 1,190 projects, with investments totaling 170 billion
yuan (US$20.96 billion) for failing to meet environmental
protection standards.
He cited, as an example, the 525 power projects evaluated, of
which 32 were ordered to halt construction after failing to meet
standards.
Stringent assessments could help curb the overheating investment
in fixed assets and align construction supply more closely with
demand, said Kuang Yaoqiu, a fellow researcher with the
Guangzhou-based Institute of Geochemistry with the Chinese Academy
of Sciences (CAS).
The three environmental protection goals SEPA hopes to reach by
2010 are improvement in the quality of the environment in major
regions and cities, environmental degradation brought under
control, and a 10 percent decrease in the discharge of major
pollutants.
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(China Daily May 27, 2006)