*3.2. Revision of Environmental Protection Law: Multiple Innovations of Legislative Concepts, Content and Model*

As the newest progress of China's environmental legislation, the *Environmental Protection Law* has been revised and adopted on 24 April 2014, and will be enforced from 1 January 2015. This law, which went through four rounds of deliberations within two years, is considered the most strict environmental protection law in China [25]. Different from past environmental legislation, this revised law has two sides to its background. One side was that air pollution, especially the haze that occurs frequently and widely provoked the public's consciousness on environmental protection, made the law-amendment stronger and stronger [26]. The other reason was that China's new leaders paid unprecedented attention to the environmental protection issues, which helped to break up the rigidities in traditional legislation and produced many new bright spots in the new law. Specifically speaking, there are three kinds of innovations, including legislative concept, administrative mechanism and legal approaches.

About the innovation of legislative concepts, the new law is located as the fundamental and comprehensive law in the environmental protection field in order to make explicit differences for the relationship with other specific laws [27]. Sustainable development concepts and ecologically conscious construction are clearly regulated as the guiding values in the new law. Meanwhile, environmental protection is also given the status of basic national policy. The new law also gave the principle of "Priority of Environmental Protection", which requires that economic development should coordinate with environmental protection [28].

About the innovation of administrative mechanisms, the new law emphasizes the multiple-governance, which means not only the government, but also enterprises and citizens, should share the environmental protection obligation burden together. At the same time, the public has been granted the rights of environmental information knowledge, participation, and supervision. Based on the principle of correspondence, the powers and responsibilities on environmental protection issues, which belong to different ministries, have also been regulated definitively and improved obviously [28]. In addition, the non-corrupt judiciary with power to imprison and impose substantial fines and other enforcement mechanisms has been also improved in this new law.

About the innovation of legal approaches, the total quantity control of pollutants, the permission of pollutant discharge, public interest litigation, the coalition prevention for cross-administrative district pollution and other important approaches are added, and the existing ones are also completed in the new law. Specifically, the government responsibility of environmental protection has been emphasized, and it will be supervised and evaluated at regular intervals [28].

One specific point that should be underlined is the innovation of legislative mode during the revised progress of *Environmental Protection Law*. As has been mentioned before, environmental quality has a direct bearing on public interest, so that this revision paid more attention to seeking opinions from all society. As a result, the revising plan changed from the partial amendment in the beginning to the full-scale revision, and the draft passed a process seeking twice as many opinions and four times the deliberation. Just by progress like this, public participation rights in the legislation have been strengthened, and reasonable opinions and suggestions can be adopted easier than before. Some information can be found from Table 3.


**Table 3.** Revised process of Environmental Protection Law [29].

#### **4. Prospects of Environmental Legislation in China**

In 2013, the new Chinese leaders put forward a new ruling idea of constructing an ecologically sound civilization, which indicated a high degree of importance on sustainable development. It also means that the road to sustainable development in China is working toward a deeper, stronger, more all-around way, from the publication of *China's Agenda of 21st Century* to the Scientific Outlook on Development and then to the construction of the ecological civilization. However, along with the rapid economic development and the large economic aggregation, China is also facing increasingly severe environmental and resource problems. The unsustainable aspects of development are also increasingly prominent. China did not hope to repeat the mistake of "treatment after pollution" during the developing progress of some Western countries, but it is really a big challenge. Therefore, in addition to the reliance on technology innovation and economic and industrial restructuring, it is indispensable to have legal safeguards for the future of China's sustainable development.

By reviewing the development process of China's environmental legislation, it can be found that one major feature of China's environmental legislation is it is deeply influenced by national development strategies and the Chinese leadership governing philosophy. Therefore, based on the above background, China's environmental legislation is expected to open up a new period of development. Some tendencies of China's environmental legislation can be foreseen as follows: Firstly, the future environmental legislation will fully implement the concept of sustainable development, and the economic development will be accelerated to transfer from extensive mode to sustainable mode supervised with clearly defined responsibilities and legal force; secondly, the future environmental legislation will promote the construction of the ecological civilization by paying more attention to the legal practice of the concept of prevention and the whole process of managing in law; thirdly, the future environmental legislation will also encourage more and more public citizen participation as it can enhance the supervision of legal drafting and implementation by strengthening public citizens' rights, and it can also urge achieving environmental quality objectives by intensifying public citizens' duties.

From the view of specific legislative fields, the direction has been shown clearly by the Legislative Planning of the 12th Standing Committee of National People's Congress. During the next five years, China's Environmental Legislation will focus on revising and improving the existing pollution control laws and natural resources laws, such as the *Law on Prevention and Control of Water Pollution*, *Law on Prevention and Control of Atmospheric Pollution, Law on the Protection of Wildlife, Forestry Law,* and *Mineral Resources Law.* On the other hand, the legislative work will also attach importance to some new areas, like *Law on Prevention and Control of Soil Pollution, Nuclear Safety Law, Law on Resources of Deep Sea* and so on, to fill in the gaps of China's environmental legal system [30]. What should be emphasized is that, looking ahead for the future, China's environmental legislation still needs to draw on global experiences, not only from the Western developed countries, but also other developing countries and emerging countries, which is being reflected in the legislative research on tackling climate change in China.

To look forward to the far future, without a doubt, the shortage of natural resources and energy scarcity are two of the most critical issues for China to achieve a sustainable future. That means, it is so important and urgent to enhance the legislation of resources recycling and low-carbon development to achieve the rational use of resources and security of energy supply. Fortunately, the international community has had good experience in legislation of both areas, and there are also productive practices and explorations within the national conditions in China. Therefore, it will be significant to bridge global experiences and local action by the way of legislation, not only to mitigate and adapt to global climate change, but also to establish the foundation and provide protection for the true sense of sustainable development in the largest developing countries of the world.

#### **5. Conclusions**

By reviewing the progress of China's environmental legislation for more than thirty years and the analysis of some new environmental legislative cases in recent years, this paper considers that China's environmental legislation will go into a brand new stage of development along with the new national development strategy of the construction of the ecological civilization raised by China's new leaders. The increasing problems of resource shortage and environmental pollution are also another reason. A large number of resource and environmental laws will appear in the next five-to-ten years. The legislative model will be in the forms of both existing law revisions and new legislation for empty fields. The legislative content will probably be the legal system improvement to achieve sustainable development by balancing economic interest and environmental interest. And the legislative procedure could be imagined to strengthen public participation to realize scientific and democratic legislation for the strategy of "Ecological Civilization".

#### **Acknowledgments**

This research is supported by Natural Science Foundation of China (41101126, 41471116), Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2011DFA91810), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2014M551142), International Postdoctoral Exchange Fellowship Program under China Postdoctoral Council (20140050); and the IKS program of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany. Special thanks go to Martin Eiffert of Humboldt University of Berlin, Timo Koivurova and Paolo Davide Farah for their valuable comments.

#### **Author Contributions**

Zhilin Mu and Bing Xue designed research, performed research and analyzed the data; Zhilin Mu and Shuchun Bu wrote the paper, and all authors read and approved the final manuscript.

#### **Conflicts of Interest**

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


