Recently, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council have issued the Several Opinions on Establishing a Long-term Monitoring and Alert Mechanism for Resources and Environmental Carrying Capacity (the "Opinions").
According to the Opinions, the resources and environmental carrying capacity is categorized into three levels, including overloading, near overloading and not overloading, and the alert levels are classified into red, orange, yellow, blue and green in descending order. The Opinions propose management and control measures respectively for water resources, land resources, environment, ecology and sea areas. Additionally, the Opinions clarify that for places where water resources are overloading, the government will suspend the granting of additional licenses for drawing water for construction projects, and implement the differentiated polices on the water resource charges. For places where land resources are overloading, the government will not allocate additional quota for construction land in principle, and will place strict control over the establishment of any more towns, districts and development zones of different types; for places with environmental overloading, the government will implement special discharge limits specified in discharge standards, run the policy of increasing the decrement replacement for the discharge of key pollutants by newly constructed, reconstructed and expanded projects, and postpone implementing the regional pollutant emission trading.