Wang Zhihua, Director of the Department of Environmental Impact Assessment and Emission Management of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, said on January 20 that in response to the fraud and other problems that arise in the environmental impact assessment market, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment has always adhered to "zero tolerance", severely punished severe punishments, and implemented comprehensive measures to promote the anti-counterfeiting of environmental impact assessment into the stage of curbing the increase and clearing the existing stock.

At the press conference held by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment that day, Wang Zhihua introduced that since the Ministry of Ecology and Environment organized a special rectification campaign to deal with fraud in third-party environmental protection service agencies in 2022, environmental impact assessment fraud has been regarded as the key content of the special rectification, and more than 150 illegal units in the field of environmental impact assessment have been investigated and dealt with. The ecological and environmental department has included more than 550 environmental assessment units and more than 540 staff members on the list of rectification within a deadline or the "blacklist" of breach of trust, and restricted or prohibited from engaging in accordance with the law.

He introduced that in terms of promoting the criminalization of environmental impact assessment fraud, the Criminal Law Amendment (XI) included environmental impact assessment fraud in the first place in the criminal law conviction and sentencing. The Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate jointly issued an explanation on several issues concerning the application of laws in handling criminal cases of environmental pollution, and refined the conviction and sentencing standards for environmental impact assessment fraud. "The Shandong Jinhua case and the Jiangxi Zhanhang case were sentenced one after another. 12 environmental impact assessment-related personnel were sentenced according to law. Some existing cases are being investigated and handled at a faster pace, which has created a strong deterrence for units and personnel who are illegally employed." He said.

In terms of strengthening normalized supervision, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment has implemented an abnormal warning mechanism for employment, and organized targeted reviews for more than 400 environmental impact assessment engineers who have compiled abnormally high number of environmental impact assessment documents and have high-frequency changes in employment information, and carried out on-site supervision and inspection to promptly eliminate hidden dangers. At the same time, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment organized localities to conduct regular review of environmental impact assessment documents, and upgraded the intelligent review system of environmental impact assessment documents to implement intelligent supervision of newly approved environmental impact assessment documents nationwide.

"Environmental assessment is both management and service." Wang Zhihua said that in the face of the complex and severe situation of increasing external pressure and increasing internal difficulties, the ecological and environmental department continues to strengthen environmental assessment guarantee for major projects, dynamically update the "three-book" of major projects at the national, local and foreign investment levels, and adopt measures such as dedicated personnel to be responsible, early intervention, regular dispatch, and strengthening guidance, and do their best to ensure environmental assessment.

In 2024, the Department of Environmental Impact Assessment and Emission Management of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment approved 54 environmental impact assessment documents for major projects such as the Daji Min Water Diversion Project, Changjiang High-speed Railway, Hulin to Changchun Natural Gas Pipeline, Yulin Coal Chemical Project, with a total investment of more than 980 billion yuan; at the same time, it guided the country to complete 129,500 environmental impact assessment approvals, involving a total investment of 21.9 trillion yuan, and strongly supported the implementation of the "two new" and "two-fold" policies.