SEPA and Protecting China's Environment

China is supposed to be serious about tackling its environment but the State Environment Protection Administration (SEPA) - tasked with setting standards and overseeing enforcement - is said to possess neither the power nor the resources to do so.

SEPA only had 300 full-time professionals, according to Elizabeth Economy, an expert on China's environment at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, plus a similar number spread across the country. In contrast, America's Environmental Protection Agency has 9,000 staff in Washington D.C. alone. (Bill Emmott, Rivals – How the Power Struggles Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, Penguin Books, 2008, 2009).

SEPA also had no legal authority to force factories that violate pollution controls to close or reform. Authority for pollution and conservation was divided among many different ministries, as well as being delegated to local governments.

Given its large size, China has several local Environmental Protection Bureaus that were supposed to enforce environmental standards in every province and large city. But SEPA was said to have no direct authority over these EPBs.

"They report not to SEPA itself but to their local governors and mayors. And the essence of China's environmental problem is that those governors and mayors do not have an interest in, or much incentive for, enforcing the country’s environmental laws. Their interest is in economic growth."

Even though the central government has attempted to link the performance of local officials to environmental protection, there had been no agreement on how this should be done and what green criteria to use.

Pan Yue, the vice-minister of SEPA, was said to have devoted three years of research to producing a set of "green GDP" accounts, which would have been used as the basis for officials' job evaluations.

But his efforts failed and it emerged in 2007 that it had been dropped. The reason was not a technical one; it was political. His efforts were too controversial. Many provinces objected.

As Emmott noted, SEPA was "an island of environmental awareness in a sea of disregard." It could not achieve much unless the Chinese leadership made "up their minds to support it, and build a consensus that the environment has to be turned into a priority, equal to that of economic growth rather than subservient to it."

Meanwhile, SEPA officials were said to have been experimenting with other ways to exert pressure: by exploiting public pressure, for example, through NGOs and public hearings; by using its limited power to refuse approval for new industrial projects in order to press local governments to close dirty old ones first; and by using banks to exert pressure through putting green conditions on their loans.

But all of these efforts were said to be “tentative and ineffective” until the leadership “really takes hold of the issue.”