Content Analysis of National EIA Reports in China

Abstract

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is globally considered an effective environmental management tool for supporting the sustainable development. It has been widely used worldwide. While there are few studies which analyze the contents of EIA reports due to lack of the information, Chinese government has started to disclose national level EIA reports since 2014. It would be effective to make clear the characteristics of Chinese EIA with the disclosed information. The objective of this research is to study the characteristics of EIA reports in China by analyzing the tendency on EIA applications from 1999 to 2014 as well as EIA reports in 2014. Two kinds of methodologies have been applied, document survey and statistical analysis. For statistical analysis, two kinds of analysis were conducted in this part, which are trend analysis and content analysis. Trend analysis would suggest that EIA system has been well set up in China but the quality of the whole review process itself still needs to be questioned. From statistical analysis, we found in some cases lower levels of estimation methods were applied for environmental items with higher assessment magnitudes.