ID: 1644
Presenting Author: Hualing Sun
Session: 653 - Biodiversity Impact Assessment: Information Disclosure, Risk Identification, and Legal Regulation
Status: pending
Biodiversity integration into EIA demands legal guidance in China. Multifaceted efforts can elevate it from technical tools to a institutional safeguard for biodiversity conservation.
Human construction activities have become one of the key drivers of biodiversity loss, threatening ecosystems and human well-being. Therefore, it is urgent to integrate biodiversity into EIA to establish ecological risk prevention from the start. Currently, while China has accumulated technical methods for biodiversity impact assessment, the lack of unified legal guidance often renders assessments perfunctory in practice. Thus, institutional research should focus on embedding biodiversity factors into EIA through the rule of law, building a comprehensive governance system including lawmaking, law enforcement, administration of justice, observance of law, and international cooperation.
Actions include: Legislative bodies should elevate the processes and accountability for relevant scientific standards into legally binding rules; Administrative bodies should take precautionary actions and manage full-process to ensure accurate and objective information while excluding undue interference; Exploration of integrating EIA reports into evidence rules and procedures for preventive public interest litigation can activate judicial pre-emptive control of ecological risks; Institutionalized participation of the public and experts in the EIA process provides vital safeguards against ecological risks, with public oversight and experts' judgment; Nations must deepen the link between technology and funding to forge a global conservation consensus. In summary, China requires multifaceted efforts to integrate biodiversity into EIA, advancing the rule of law of biodiversity conservation.
Tian Yiyao is an Associate Professor at the School of Law of Tianjin University.
Sun Hualing is a Researcher at the Research Institute of China Green Development of Tianjin University.
Coauthor 1: Yiyao Tian