NRDC Supports China’s Soil Pollution Governance and Provides Recommendations for Legislation

2017-07-01

© Jeremiah/Flickr/CC

China's government had committed to fight against soil pollution as one of the three major battles of environmental protection aligned with air and water pollution. In July China's national legislature agency, the National People's congress (NPC) released the first draft of soil pollution control law for public comments. In order to support this ongoing legislative work, NRDC has been conducting researches on international legal approaches on soil pollution and toxics remediation regulation in the European Union, the United States, and Japan. We also organized several roundtables and workshops with Chinese experts, lawyers and NGO representatives aiming to make our studies to focus on the key issues of the soil legislation. Based on the outcomes of the researches and the roundtable discussion, we submitted NRDC's recommendations to NPC through its public commentary channels in July. We suggested to add key issues that were not mentioned in the draft, including health-based standards, add petroleum related soil pollution into regulatory scheme, emergency response to severe soil pollution incidents, and provided more constructive comments on how to improve those provisions on remediation approaches, responsible parties and liability scheme, environmental information disclosure and public participation mechanism.  

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