Against crisis, China attempts to tighten enforcement of pollution laws

Following last month's acid spill in Jiangsu, China's government has acted to tighten enforcement of the country's environmental laws. Charles McElwee's China Environmental Law Blog reports that the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has issued a new Notice containing several innovative policies, including a focus on corrective action, designed to strengthen enforcement of China's environmental laws (see also previous post on problems in the country's environmental enforcement).

This move comes as part of a broader effort by Beijing to improve environmental protection, especially as it concerns water pollution. In February, following the Jiangsu disaster, a senior MEP official acknowledged that despite several previous attempts to control pollution, "The general situation of environmental pollution does not allow us to be optimistic" (see Xinhua).

This month appears to have brought redoubled efforts to redress the situation. An MEP circular issued last week castigated local authorities for lax enforcement of water pollution laws, and to improve water quality monitoring (see Xinhua). Officials also announced today (March 30) that thirteen officials in Henan province were punished (one with a prison sentence) for failing to stop arsenic contamination on a stretch of the Dasha river, which news reports said was some 899 times healthy levels (see Xinhua).

Such efforts to strengthen the enforcement of environmental laws are necessary, but they illustrate an important failing in China's environmental policy: its obsession with the idea of a centralized "policy cudgel." What I mean by this is the insistence that the central government's policies would indeed improve China's environmental situation, if only local governments could be cowed into following orders (this appears to be a primary motivation behind recent MEP Regional Supervision Centers- more on this later). This approach is far too blunt an instrument, particularly when China's legal system doesn't bear anything like the enforcement capabilities wielded by, say, the US Environmental Protection Administration.

Instead of focusing on building a bigger and more potent cudgel, Beijing should focus on the longer-term tasks of enhancing citizen participation and NGO monitoring capabilities to aid in environmental enforcement, while also pursuing political and legal reforms that will make it easier to take polluters, and the corrupt officials that protect them, to court. Promotion of officials based on economic growth statistics should be ended. Moreover, less coercive, market-based approaches like Payment for Ecosystem Services should be pursued aggressively.

Robust environmental protection requires an expensive, resource- and bureaucracy-intensive edifice. But the public interests it protects- clean air, clean water, healthy people- are vital to a prosperous, sustainable society.

Dealing with transboundary water pollution in China

Most water pollution by nature crosses boundaries; in China, incidents like February's acid leak in Jiangsu indicate the inability of local authorities to deal with contamination. A good recent post on water security by Ma Jun on China Dialogue reports that, on average, there's an environmental incident in China once every two days, 70% of which involve water pollution. A delegate to China's People's Political Consultative Committee highlighted the trans-boundary water pollution issue by calling for the development of a compensation system, a first step toward establishing clear liability for water polluters.

The delegate, also the Vice-President of Anhui University, Wu Cunmei, noted that it is impossible to prevent contaminated water from flowing through watersheds. The national government should, Wu said, quickly establish a dispute-resolution and compensation mechanism for transboundary water pollution (see China Environment Report, in Chinese only).

As Wu noted, regions near the headwaters of river systems often garner economic benefits by polluting watersheds for downstream users, who must bear the costs themselves. This kind of "local protectionism," (地方保护主义) Wu said, damages the whole national system for preventing water pollution, making it an imperative to develop new mechanisms for transboundary dispute resolution and compensation.

None of this is really news, but it's heartening to hear a delegate to one of China's important "two meetings" (两会) speak so forcefully about environmental protection, and to single out watersheds for the development of an eco-compensation framework. Many experts agree that eco-compensation is particularly suitable for use in watersheds, where the benefits of clean water are clear for both upstream and downstream users (see previous post). Providing local governments with a means to "sue" other jurisdictions might also provide a potent secondary-enforcement mechanism, by deterring areas that may be tempted to adopt lax enforcement.

Nonetheless, creating a robust compensation and dispute-resolution system will be thorny. As long as local officials are rewarded chiefly for effecting economic growth, there will be strong incentives to "pass the cost along" by allowing industry to pollute with minimal enforcement and mitigation (see previous post). Moreover, a compensation regime should be carefully designed to encourage watershed management, not just to compensate downstream users for pollution. It's difficult to include the benefits of, for example, preserving forest cover near river system headwaters in any compensation regime.

Here's an opportunity for an enterprising NGO (or even friendly foreign government?) to step in and offer to provide expertise to the Chinese government in constructing a durable watershed pollution compensation and dispute resolution mechanism. As water scarcity increases and the pollution problem becomes more ingrained, China's leadership will surely be grateful for all the help they can get.

Good news for environmental regionalism in China- and sustainable development in Tibet

One of China Greenspace's favorite causes is environmental regionalism in China (see previous posts on international cooperation and regional environmental protection).

It's good news, then that China's Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) is embarking on its "first large scale river basin enforcement campaign," which will cover the Yangtze and 10 tributaries (see China Environmental Law Blog). This kind of regional approach makes a lot of sense, particularly for watersheds (see previous post on Payment for Ecosystem Services for more on this). But the whole point of regionalism is that it liberates local authorities from central control, so we'll have to see whether MEP's role is more as coordinator or more as autocrat.

In addition, a recent post from China Dialogue offers some nice lessons about community-based sustainable development in Tibet. These lessons are worth a read, especially since they seem relevant to environmental protection in traditional-society contexts elsewhere in the world.

Payment for Ecosystem Services in China

When CGS first arrived in China, "payment for ecosystem services" (PES) was a term bandied about by Chinese government officials almost as frequently as "sustainable development." It may be a buzzword, but PES is worthy of some greater attention, not least because China's government appears to take the concept seriously.

PES is basically paying people to exercise stewardship over natural resources that provide economic value. Thus, Shanghai might pay adjacent communities not to sell or build on coastal wetlands to reduce the risk of flooding and storm damage to the city, for example.

As a country with diverse, complex ecosystems that have been imperiled by economic growth, China could use PES as an alternative method of protecting critical environmental resources. Moreover, PES has potential as a poverty-reduction strategy. It should be noted that China has already implemented some PES schemes, such as its Sloping Land Conversion Program, which subsidises grain purchases for farmers who agree to reforest sloping land (thus combatting erosion). A 2006 report entitled "Developing Future Ecosystems Services Payments in China" provides some helpful thoughts on how PES could be usefully implemented in China.

The report discerns three types of rights which are critical for PES: rights to resources (possessed by the seller of ecosystem services), rights to access ecosystem services (which are purchased from the possessor by the buyer), and rights to buy and sell ecosystem services, which are possessed by both parties (p. 25). As the report notes, if such a framework is to be implemented in China, the uncertain legal character of rural land tenure will need to be resolved (p. 64).

Moreover, the report notes, land management is the currently the responsibility of four different ministries; some coordination or consolidation would be useful. Covering local implementation costs in PES project budgets is essential to actual implementation (p. 58). Finally, starting by expanding watershed rights systems would be useful because such systems are typically easiest to implement.

It's welcome, then, that the Chinese government is co-financing, with the Asian Development Bank, a technical assistance study which aims to develop national guidelines for eco-system compensation in river basins. The study, begun in 2008, aims to develop guidelines to identify the rights and responsibilities of various stakeholders, monitoring and evaluation, and changes to tax systems. If successful, the report will do much to encourage the development of PES in China.

However, one of the recommendations in Developing Future Ecosystems Services Payments in China, clarifying land tenure, deserves further mention. Rural land tenure rights, though supposedly set in law, in fact vary by locality. Efforts to change the situation often run into difficulties, as the government's recent attempts at rural land reform indicate.

CGS is often interested in the political and social dimensions of environmental change, and here is a good example of how macro-political structures impede environmental protection. Land tenure is tricky in China because of the history of Communist policies, concern for rural opinion, and the priorities of local government. It won't be easy to hack through this thicket of political and social interests, but for the sake of PES in China, let's hope it can be done.