Minister: Environmental inspections to continue apace

Central government bodies and State-owned enterprises will be covered as the country carries out a new round of high-profile central environmental inspection, which proved successful in addressing environmental violations, the country’s top environmental watchdog said on Thursday.

The new round of inspection will be rolled out across the country in the next three years, starting in 2019. Law enforcement officers, led by minister-level officials, will spend another year revisiting all areas to check whether violations they found have been rectified, said Li Ganjie, minister of ecology and environment.

Li made the comment while addressing the opening of a training session for officers that will participate in the inspections.

With inspection tasks clearly laid out, inspectors should follow violations they find all the way through until they are rectified, Li said.

He also asked his colleagues to pay special attention to the ongoing seven pollution control campaigns, including ones for air pollution control, Yangtze River and Bohai Sea ecological remediation and carrying out surprise and targeted inspections to areas and enterprises with outstanding environmental problems.

The application of the latest technology, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, satellite remote sensing and big data should be enhanced in the inspection, Li said.

The central environmental inspection, headed by ministerial-level officials and launched in 2016, covered all provincial regions in the Chinese mainland as of 2017.

Inspectors also revisited these regions last year to see if violations they found were rectified.

The inspection has found thousands of major violations and held hundreds of officials accountable.

According to a media release from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment in late 2018, a total of 917 officials, including 173 prefecture-level ones, were held accountable for 92 environmental violations in the third batch of the inspection covering seven provincial regions, including Shanxi, Liaoning, Anhui and Hunan provinces.