Integrating Climate Change Factors within China’s Environmental Impact Assessment Legislation : New Challenges and Developments

Climate change and its undeniable impacts highlight the need to be considered in existing development tools. Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has been recommended to incorporate the impacts on climate change as a preventative instrument to identify, assess and mitigate the adverse environmental effects of proposed and current undertakings. This article finds that EIA can do more by working in a ‘climate change - plan/project - environment' interaction, where climate change impacts on proposed plan/project and environment can also be assessed. Thus, the integration of climate change issues could in turn improve the resilience of proposed plan/project. Although difficulties of integrating climate change within EIA are apparent; such as scientific uncertainty, the difficulty to separate from climate variability and the interaction between climate change and economic activities, various approaches have been developed to overcome these challenges. Canada's experience will be used as an example to illustrate how EIA in China could integrate climate change without fear. However, given the ineffectiveness of China's current EIA legislation, significant EIA improvements are imperative to provide climate-friendly and climate-proofing solutions. This article also reveals that integration of climate change does not change essential steps of EIA, but will inevitably influence specific steps by accounting for climate change factors