All construction projects must be evaluated by an environmental evaluation agency to determine environmental impact before construction begins. However, what responsibility do these environmental evaluation agencies bear if they don’t make accurate reports, which may cause harm to the environment and damage the project? The answer is in punitive action announced Wednesday by the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA).
Vice-director of the Supervision Bureau of SEPA Wu Po announced Wednesday at a press conference that the Beifang Architecture Institute and Chengda Chemical Engineering Company of China will not be allowed to make environmental evaluations or use their credentials for six months. It’s the first time for SEPA to publicize such punitive action.
The Beifang Architecture Institute was in charge of an environmental impact evaluation report in April 2001 on a chemical plant with an annual production capacity of 6,000-tons of sodium cyanide of the Huilong Chemical Limited Company of Zhangjiakou in north China’s Hebei Province. During its evaluation, this institute did not implement carefully state industrial policy and did not analyze the environmental risks of the project sufficiently and carefully, ignoring the criteria on sodium cyanide industrial layout. Thanks to the erroneous evaluation report, the chemical plant was launched in the upper reaches of the Guanting Reservoir. Learning of the situation through a citizen informant, the State Environmental Protection Administration carried out an immediate investigation. But the project with an investment of 9 million yuan (US$1,086,956) was almost completed and set to go into operation.
The Chengda Chemical Engineering Company was responsible for drawing up the environmental impact report for a chemical plant with an annual production capacity of 4,000-tons of sodium cyanide in the Fengdu Nitrogenous Fertilizer Factory of Sichuan Province in June 1995. The project was illegal as it didn’t get the permission from relevant departments. Nevertheless, the Chengda Company did an environmental impact evaluation report in which it wrongly concluded that the project which is just a dozen meters (10.94 yards) away from the reservoir of the Three Gorges project could be launched. By the time departments concerned came to deal with the matter, 60 million yuan (US$7.25 million) had been invested in the project, with the workshops basically completed.
These agencies that received sanction are the first group, and SEPA will announce a second group in the future, said Vice-director Wu Bo.
Wu said that SEPA reviewed the credentialed environmental evaluation agencies around China starting in November 2001 and that now the review is generally finished. The targets of assessment include 192 A-grade agencies and 561 B-grade agencies. The result of the assessment shows that a few agencies and their crews have a long way to go to meet basic requirements, with low evaluation quality and erroneous conclusions. The State Environmental Protection Administration plans to punish those unqualified agencies after review by revoking credentials, stopping operations, demoting, criticizing and reforming within a time limit.
Regarding how to supervise the environmental evaluation agencies -- which is a concern of all the fields of society -- Wu said that the environmental protection administrations at all levels should have stringent checks on the environmental evaluation quality during examination and approval. There are four ways environmental evaluation supervision is conducted:
The first way is a preliminary check by experts on the statistics and formulations used in the environmental impact report that puts demands on the environmental evaluation agencies. The second is supervision by the environmental protection bureaus at all levels. The third is supervision regarding the meeting of regulations inside SEPA. The fourth is an additional check on large-scale and the especially massive projects by the Review Committee of SEPA. In addition, the environmental protection bureaus at all levels should have professional training for staff engaged in environmental impact evaluation. The above overall ways and measures of supervision together with day-to-day supervision can guarantee in most cases the supervision and examination work on the environmental evaluation agencies.
The environmental impact report and the report form are technological grounds for the environmental approval and executive decision, said vice-director Wu, who held that the environmental evaluation agencies must be responsible for their conclusions. Wu urged all environmental evaluation agencies to build up high responsibility, enhance quality control systems, organize technicians on a regular basis to study related state industrial policies and the environmental evaluation regulations, implement strictly relevant administrative regulations on the environmental impact evaluation and its qualifications for the construction project, and improve overall evaluation quality.
(By Han Lin, china.org.cn staff reporter, translated by Zhang Tingting April 26, 2002)
