Six challenges for the construction of low carbon and environmental protection

In accordance with the current development trend, in the next decade, China's economic development level will enter the middle and upper income countries, and gradually into the late industrialization, the urbanization rate will reach about 60%, resources, energy and other consumption peaks are expected to come one after another. These factors have provided a strong driving force for China's environmental protection work, but also become the basic cause of environmental protection work pressure in China.

In the next decade, the cumulative, long-term, complex, and new environmental issues of pollutant emissions in China will be intertwined, and environmental protection will become more complex. For some traditional pollutants, the marginal cost of emission reduction began to increase substantially, and the pressure for emission reductions continued to increase. Although the old environmental problems are expected to be resolved gradually, the environmental risks of toxic and hazardous substances such as heavy metal pollution and hazardous wastes are already in a high-risk situation. Accumulative and difficult-to-control problems such as heavy metals and industrial site pollution will continue to exist for a long period of time. The focus of pollution prevention will also shift from industrial sources to regional, industry, watershed integrated environmental issues, and rural environmental issues.

At the same time, with the improvement of living standards, the people's demand for environmental quality is also increasing accordingly. It will be more difficult to achieve the level of environmental quality that is compatible with China's well-to-do society in 2020. Emphasizing and accelerating environmental policy innovation and practice will become an urgent requirement for China's environmental protection work in the new situation.

Regulatory policy has always been the "protagonist" of China's environmental policy system.

Over the past 30 years of reform and opening up, China’s environmental policy system has made significant progress. Basic environmental policies including a controlled environmental policy, environmental economic policy, public participation, and voluntary policies have been basically established. This has helped the smooth development of China’s environmental protection work. Played an important role.

As China is undergoing a process of transformation from a planned economy to a socialist market economy, the inherent inertia of the system has resulted in controlled policies that have always been the “protagonist” of China’s environmental policy system, mainly relying on laws and regulations, standards, and administrative orders to control Implementation. China has successively formulated 9 environmental protection laws, 15 laws for the protection of natural resources, more than 50 administrative regulations for environmental protection, and more than 500 national environmental standards. Many environmental policies have been institutionalized and eight environmental management systems, including the environmental responsibility system and environmental impact assessment, have been formed. However, regulatory policies generally have short-term and emergency features.

Environmental economic policies that consider economic development and environmental protection as a whole have received increasing attention. However, both in the past and the present, environmental and economic policies are still mainly used as an aid to government environmental control policies. The insufficiency or lack of application of environmental economic policies has resulted in the low cost of environmental resources and the inability to use market mechanisms to optimize the allocation of environmental resources. This has led to a significant reduction in the efficiency of the entire environmental policy system. The use of environmental information disclosure and voluntary agreement policies and methods has also been increasingly valued. Despite this, the application of environmental information disclosure policy based on public participation is still relatively lacking. Even though many policies have seriously considered public participation at the beginning of the formulation, they are often due to over-complicated implementation procedures and inadequate safeguards. Caused low public participation.

In the next decade, China will face six major challenges in building its environmental policy system.

In the next decade, China will undergo a series of changes in the characteristics of environmental issues and the demand for environmental protection. China's environmental policies must respond to such changes, and adapting to these changes will face challenges from the following six aspects.

First, pollution control and emission reduction is still one of the key environmental protection tasks. It still needs to be further improved and strengthened as the main line of environmental protection work. At the same time, further attention must be paid to the prevention and control of toxic and harmful pollutants and excessive nutrient salts such as nitrogen and phosphorus.

Secondly, the focus of environmental protection will gradually shift from the discharge of standards for compliance of enterprises to the control of total discharge of pollutants to the improvement of environmental quality and prevention of environmental risks. Environmental protection work needs to be strengthened in connection with the people’s personal experience, and pollution reduction and environmental risk management should be implemented. Think more about environmental quality improvement guidance;

Thirdly, the increasingly prominent regional pollution problems require the adjustment of regional environmental policies, the greater use of regional characteristics of total pollutant control, integrated urban and rural control, and integrated river basin control policies;

Fourth, many pollution prevention and control efforts have synergistic emission reduction effects, and environmental policies in the next decade need to pay great attention to this;

Fifth, with the improvement of people's living standards and increasing awareness of environmental rights and interests, asking the government to provide higher environmental quality has become the basic aspiration of the public, and the environmental needs of the people are expected to be the basic basis for reviewing China's implementation of environmental policies;

Sixth, in the past many years, despite the fact that China has formulated many good environmental policies, the supporting supporting capacity of the implementation of the policies has not kept pace. In particular, the monitoring-reporting-certification mechanism for environmental data has not been well established because The data distortion caused by the assessment poses a great challenge to the implementation of environmental policies, and it is difficult for environmental performance assessment to play a role.

In the next decade, China's environmental policy will show ten typical characteristics

In the future, China’s environmental policies need to accelerate innovation, face challenges, make up for shortcomings and gaps, and adapt to the needs of environmental protection in the new situation.

The first is to continue to strengthen the total pollutant emission reduction policy. In addition to continuing to lay emphasis on the formulation and implementation of the four major pollutant emission reduction policies of COD, SO2, ammonia nitrogen, and NOx, we must also formulate pollution emission reduction policies for toxic and hazardous substances, nutritive substances, and volatile organic compounds;

Second, environmental policies will gradually shift from pollution-control policies to environmental policies that aim at improving environmental quality and preventing and controlling environmental risks. This requires that, in the next ten years, environmental protection laws, regulations, and standards must be given special emphasis on environmental quality and environmental risk control.

The third is to continuously improve the role of environmental economic policies in environmental protection work. Actively promote eco-compensation, improve the pollution discharge policy, accelerate the reform of environmental taxes, accelerate the use of green finance policies and green trade policies, and gradually build environmental resource pricing policy mechanisms that reflect the cost of environmental resources;

The fourth is to actively introduce and implement environmental investment and financing policies, and introduce social capital into the environmental protection field. In order to achieve environmental quality standards or environmental quality and safety, a large amount of funds are required to be continuously invested. In addition to continuing to increase the government's financial resources for environmental protection, it is necessary to broaden the sources of financial resources for environmental protection.

Fifth, attach importance to the implementation of environmental policies that reflect regional differences. Considering the characteristics of phase differences in regional development, formulate and implement differentiated environmental protection policies for the four major regions of the East, Central, West, and Northeast regions, and establish differentiated environmental policies based on the main functional areas;

Sixthly, it attaches great importance to advancing the policy of multi-pollution cooperative control Accelerate the formulation and implementation of collaborative emission reduction policies that promote the prevention and control of source water pollutants, promote clean production and recycling economic policies for coordinated reduction of industrial source pollutants, and reduce pollutant emission and greenhouse gas emission reductions.

Seventh, the implementation of environmental policies has received increasing attention, and it has gradually begun to shift from the emphasis on the implementation of environmental policies to the implementation of environmental policies. Promote the implementation of the socialization and publicization of environmental monitoring and evaluation services, and strengthen the monitoring-reporting-certification mechanism of environmental data to ensure that data quality is not distorted by environmental assessment;

The eighth is to attach greater importance to public participation and the role of environmental protection voluntary policies in environmental protection work. Implement more effective environmental information disclosure policies to facilitate public participation, supervision, and rights protection. EIA reports, pollution permits, corporate environmental monitoring, "three-simultaneous" acceptance, environmental quality, and other necessary environmental information should all be made public and mobilized. The entire social forces carry out environmental protection;

Nine is to attach importance to promoting environmental performance assessment. To create policy conditions for environmental quality assessment, environmental quality should be used as a binding indicator for the assessment of government environmental protection goals, and increase the proportion of environmental quality in the evaluation of local government performance;

The tenth is to pay attention to the construction of an environmental policy assessment mechanism. In response to the large number of policies introduced in our country, the lack of coordination and enforcement of policies requires the acceleration of the construction of a normal environmental policy assessment mechanism.