The General Office of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment ("MEE") has recently issued the Technical Guidelines for the Planning of Environmental Impact Assessment: General Principles (Draft for Comment) (the "Draft for Comment") to solicit opinions from the entities concerned by June 15, 2018.
The Draft for Comment, amended in nine aspects to be more feasible than the previous standards, highlights the requirements for work on "red line for ecological protection, environmental quality bottom-line, upper limits of resource utilization and the negative list on environmental access". Some specific revisions are as follows. The Draft for Comment revises relevant descriptions of assessment purposes, stressing the requirement that improving environmental quality shall serve as the core, and classifies assessing procedures into work procedures and technical procedures, with the contents concerning work procedures relocated into the Schedule A and adding the technical flowchart. In addition, the Draft for Comment removes contents with respect to the analysis of planning uncertainties and adds contents and requirements on the setup of predicted scenarios into the Chapter "Forecast and Assessment of Environmental Impacts". Furthermore, it introduces requirements on region-based environmental management and control and the negative list on environmental access, among others, and makes supplements to contents and requirements in respect of region-based environmental management and control.