Recently, the General Office of the Ministry of Environmental Protection ("MEP") has issued the Technical Guidelines for Environmental Impact Assessment: Surface Water Environment (Draft for Comment) (the "Draft for Comment") to solicit comments from the units concerned before November 13, 2017.
The Draft for Comment includes major amendments as follows. The first is adjusting and standardizing the terms and definitions; the second is adjusting criteria for determining the grading in respect of the environmental impact assessment on surface water environment; the third is introducing additional provisions to improve the scope of assessment and the assessment period; the fourth is modifying requirements on investigations and additional monitoring activities; the fifth is revising methods to predict environmental impacts on the surface water, adding some other rules into the methods used to predict water environmental impacts on river network areas and flat areas, and optimizing methods to forecast water environmental impacts on the estuaries and offshore areas; the sixth is improving and refining content and requirements of water environmental impact assessment; the seventh is bringing in methods to analyze and calculate the permitting loadings of pollutant and the ecological flows; the eighth is adding requirements on the measures to protect the surface water environment, estimation of investment in this regard, and conclusions drawn from the environmental impact assessment on surface water; and the last is updating the appendixes.