After the "October 1st" holiday in 2017, reporters visited multiple county-level chemical parks in Lianyungang, Yancheng, and Huai'an. Local leaders conveyed the spirit of the central and provincial economic work conferences, believing that the test of environmental protection for investment promotion will only become greater and greater.

The changes in investment attraction and existing enterprise operations in various development zones, especially chemical industrial parks, are a typical epitome of China's emphasis on green development in recent years. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the previous extensive development model has fundamentally begun to transform. After a series of strict environmental policies were implemented, it directly forced local governments to reconsider their ideas for regional economic and industrial development.

As the second largest province in China in terms of economic output, Jiangsu also bears the historical burden of heavy industrial structure, high development intensity, and high total emissions. As a high implementation of the central spirit, Jiangsu began implementing the strictest "263" environmental protection special action plan in history in 2016, ensuring the completion of the provincial "13th Five Year Plan" ecological environment protection goals and tasks.

Transformation of the chemical industry

Like steel and petroleum, the chemical industry is an important component of the national economy and has also become a key focus of Jiangsu's current environmental governance.

Statistics show that in 2014, Jiangsu had 4139 large-scale petroleum and chemical enterprises, achieving a main revenue of 1.88 trillion yuan (second in the country) and a profit of 103.45 billion yuan,

If a company believes that the rectification is completed, then the relevant responsible persons of the company, park management committee, and environmental protection bureau must sign to assume responsibility. "An official from a park management committee stated that this is an important guarantee for risk prevention. The local government has explicitly required "small businesses" to actively "cooperate" with large enterprises, converting "assets" into "capital" to facilitate the entry and exit of existing investors.

Letting go of enterprises to handle solid waste

An important lever for the transformation of local governance concepts driven by environmental protection is assessment.

Because infrastructure investment has a fixed plan, it can ensure a certain investment growth rate. In the past, the government took over everything, but now it has been found that leaving it to the market is actually better, "said a local government official. In this way, the governance of the chemical industry by local governments has shifted towards optimizing the investment environment.

Local government officials have proposed that existing chemical enterprises are compliant, but environmental governance is still ongoing and standards need to be raised in the new round of development. They hope that the central government can extend the level of soliciting opinions on the new standards to the county level.

Linkage between environmental credit reporting and bank risk control

According to the reform process, Jiangsu has piloted the "environmental monitoring, supervision, and law enforcement vertical management" reform. The county-level environmental protection bureau has been adjusted to a dispatched branch of the prefecture level environmental protection bureau, which is directly managed by the municipal environmental protection bureau. The members of the leadership team are appointed and dismissed by the municipal environmental protection bureau.

In practice, environmental protection departments have also encountered reasonable demands from enterprises, as environmental credit reporting needs to be steadily promoted and continuously improved in order to be more accurate. The 21st Century Business Herald reporter learned from an interview in Suzhou that differential water and electricity prices have been implemented on a large scale since 2016, and have been promoted throughout the province. Starting from 2018, the constraints will be even greater, directly forcing enterprises to transform and upgrade.

In the current coverage, state-owned and provincial-level enterprises (above designated size enterprises) have been fully included and equipped with monitoring equipment. The next step is to cover medium-sized enterprises as well as small and micro enterprises with a large quantity and wide coverage, change human resource evaluation, and achieve online monitoring, automatic collection and analysis. It is expected to reach 150000 by 2020.

Reprinted from 21st Century Business Herald, author: Wang Haiping