Water Pollution Control in China: Review of laws, regulations and policies and their implementation

The Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA) was established in June 2008, aiming to pursue three pillars of research issues, “Deepening integration”, “Narrowing Development Gaps”, and “Sustainable Development”. Under the pillar of “Sustainable Development”, a project on mainstreaming sustainable development policies in East Asia (ERIA-SD project) was initiated for the period 2008-2010 and IGES is responsible for its coordination. The purpose of this project is to promote sustainable development concerns into policy making process in this region, in particular developing countries. Under the ERIA-SD project, IGES conducted a study on the enforcement of water pollution control in China, for which we prepared this policy review.
The purpose of this report is to review China’s environmental laws, regulations and policies with special focus on water pollution prevention and control. In this report, we analyse the evolution process of environmental laws and regulations in China with special emphasis on water pollution control. The environmental legal system and environmental management organizations are illustrated. We also introduced major implementation measures for the enforcement of environmental laws and regulations and provided two case studies to indicate the current situation and future trend of China’s water pollution control.