The relevant person in charge of the Environmental Assessment Department of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment answered questions from reporters on the "Technical Guidelines for Environmental Impact Assessment Highway Construction Projects"

Recently, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment issued the "Technical Guidelines for Environmental Impact Assessment Highway Construction Projects"(HJ1358 -2024)(hereinafter referred to as the "Guidelines for Highway Environmental Impact Assessment"). The relevant person in charge of the Environmental Assessment Department of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment answered questions from reporters on the background, significance, main characteristics and content of the formulation of the "Highway Environmental Assessment Guidelines".

Question: What is the background and significance of the formulation of the "Guidelines for Highway Environmental Assessment"?

Answer:First of all, the formulation of the "Guidelines for Highway Environmental Assessment" is an important measure to implement the major decisions and arrangements of the Party Central Committee and the State Council. The Party Central Committee and the State Council attach great importance to the ecological and environmental protection of transportation infrastructure, including highways. The 11th meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Committee emphasized the need to build a modern infrastructure system to achieve the unity of economic, social, ecological and safety benefits. The "Carbon Peak Action Plan before 2030" issued by the State Council clearly requires that green and low-carbon concepts should be integrated into the entire process of transportation infrastructure planning, construction, operation and maintenance to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions throughout the life cycle. Therefore, it is necessary to formulate the "Guidelines for Highway Environmental Impact Assessment" to implement the important decisions and arrangements of the Party Central Committee and the State Council on the ecological and environmental protection of transportation infrastructure and promote the construction of green and low-carbon highways. Secondly, the formulation of the "Guidelines for Highway Environmental Assessment" is an inevitable requirement to mitigate the adverse ecological and environmental impacts of highway project construction. As an important transportation infrastructure, highways have an objective environmental impact. Generally speaking, it is difficult to completely avoid environmentally sensitive areas such as ecological protection red lines and concentrated residential areas in highway project routing, which may have obvious adverse impacts on the ecosystem and acoustic environment along the route. It is urgent to further clarify and strengthen the environment of highway construction projects. Protection requirements, effectively improve the ecological and environmental protection level of highway projects, effectively protect the ecological environment along the route and protect the legitimate interests of relevant residents, and promote the construction of green roads. Third, the formulation of the "Guidelines for Highway Environmental Impact Assessment" is a practical need to further standardize the environmental impact assessment management of such projects. In recent years, our Ministry has successively issued a series of environmental impact assessment technical guidelines such as ecological environmental assessment guidelines, acoustic environment guidelines, and groundwater environmental assessment guidelines, providing technical support for the development of environmental assessment work of highway projects. However, in the practice of environmental assessment of highway projects, problems such as inconsistent parameters used in noise prediction models, lack of prominent evaluation priorities, unclear ecological and noise prevention measures, and failure to include new requirements such as greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to climate change in the evaluation content. The promulgation of this guideline puts forward clear requirements for existing problems, which can further standardize the environmental assessment work of highway projects and unify management standards.

Question: What are the characteristics of this guideline formulation?

Answer:First, adhere to the concepts of ecological priority, green and low-carbon. It is required to give priority to optimizing site selection to avoid or reduce the occupation of environmentally sensitive areas, so as to reduce the adverse impact on the ecosystem and residents along the route from the source; for requirements such as strengthening ecological protection and noise prevention and control that are difficult to avoid, green construction techniques should be adopted, clean and low-emission measures such as construction machinery require relevant work on greenhouse gas emission control and adaptation to climate change, and promote the construction of green and low-carbon highways.

The second is to emphasize compliance with laws and regulations and coordination of standards. In accordance with the provisions of laws and regulations such as the Environmental Protection Law of the People's Republic of China, the Environmental Impact Assessment Law of the People's Republic of China, the Noise Pollution Prevention and Control Law of the People's Republic of China, and the Environmental Protection Management Regulations of Construction Projects, combined with the technical requirements of the general outline of environmental impact assessment technical guidelines, ecological environmental assessment guidelines, and acoustic environment guidelines, relevant content is further refined and clarified in the "Guidelines for Highway Environmental Assessment." By recommending internationally accepted, industry-recognized, and practically-feasible prediction models and technical methods, it is required to adopt strict ecological and environmental protection measures that meet current ecological and environmental protection requirements and are technically and economically feasible, strengthen environmental management and environmental monitoring, and ensure that the newly formulated "Highway Environmental Impact Assessment Guidelines" comply with relevant laws and regulations and are generally consistent with the existing environmental impact assessment technical guidance system and environmental assessment practices.

The third is to highlight industry characteristics and improve management efficiency. Combined with the characteristics of highway projects as linear projects, the evaluation work focuses on the impact and protection measures on the ecological and acoustic environment along the line, weakening the environmental impact assessment of elements such as the atmosphere that are less related to the highway project; at the same time, segmented evaluation and simplified gas station evaluation are adopted. Innovative measures such as evaluation will further reduce unnecessary environmental impact assessment work content and improve management efficiency.

Question: What are the main contents of the "Guidelines for Highway Environmental Assessment"?

Answer:According to the requirements of the general outline of environmental impact assessment technical guidelines, combined with environmental impact assessment guidelines for other industries, the main contents of the "Highway Environmental Assessment Guidelines" are determined, which mainly include three major parts: the first part is general provisions. Including the scope of application of the guidelines, normative reference documents, terms and definitions, general principles, etc., it stipulates the basic tasks, basic requirements and working procedures of highway project environmental assessment. The second part is the main content of the evaluation. Including the project overview, impact identification, evaluation level and scope, current situation investigation and evaluation, impact prediction and evaluation, environmental protection measures, environmental management and monitoring, conclusions, etc., mainly to guide how to carry out the environmental assessment work of highway projects. The third part is supplementary provisions. The specification requirements for environmental impact assessment maps, noise and other prediction technical methods are given to provide detailed guidance and technical support for the preparation of environmental impact assessment documents.

Question: How is the scope of application of the "Guidelines for Highway Environmental Assessment" considered?

Answer:The scope of application of this guideline is highway, primary highway and secondary highway construction projects, and other levels of highway construction projects can be referred to for implementation. The determination of this scope of application is mainly based on the following considerations: First, the noise impact of highways, first-class highways and second-class highways is relatively more prominent, and most of them belong to the items for preparing reports in the EIA classification. Second, the current prediction and evaluation technologies and models for highway project noise are mostly based on research on the environmental impact of highways above second-level and have good applicability in the environmental impact assessment of highways, first-level highways and second-level highways. For roads below Level 2, due to factors such as road entrances and exits, non-uniform vehicle speeds, and unstable traffic flow, the noise transmission characteristics of roads are nonlinear and irregular, and the applicability of models is poor. Third, most highways below Level 2 are projects for preparing report forms. Therefore, we can refer to these guidelines to carry out work and propose targeted measures to prevent and control environmental pollution and ecological damage in conjunction with the evaluation requirements of our Ministry on report form items.

Question: What are the innovations of the "Guidelines for Highway Environmental Assessment"?

Answer:There are many innovations in the formulation of this guideline, mainly reflected in three aspects: First, segmented evaluation has been implemented. When determining the ecological evaluation level of a construction project, only one level is generally determined, which is applicable to point-like projects. Highway projects are linear projects, generally extending for tens to hundreds of kilometers. Different road sections (such as sections involving nature reserves and ordinary road sections) involve different environmental protection goals, and the corresponding current situation surveys and prediction evaluations are different. If the whole line is at the same evaluation level, the workload is huge. In order to more accurately evaluate and improve efficiency, combined with the recently promulgated and implemented ecological environmental assessment guidelines, the evaluation level is determined separately for road sections involving sensitive areas, with key evaluations, and strict protection measures are proposed. For other sections that do not involve sensitive areas, the evaluation is simplified. Secondly, the evaluation content involving gas stations has been simplified. According to the current groundwater environmental impact assessment guidelines and soil environmental impact assessment guidelines, for highway projects, when conducting groundwater and soil assessments, the gas stations included in the highway should determine the evaluation level and scope in accordance with the guidelines, and conduct evaluations. During the formulation of this guideline, considering that the groundwater and soil protection measures at gas stations are simple and mature, and that standards such as the "Technical Guidelines for the Prevention and Control of Groundwater Pollution in Gas Stations (Trial)" issued by our Ministry and relevant industry departments for gas stations in recent years can effectively guide Gas station projects to prevent pollution to groundwater and soil environment and other factors, we innovated our ideas, simplified the evaluation of highway gas stations, and implemented strict anti-leakage measures as required. Exemption from evaluation of anti-seepage measures. Third, requirements for greenhouse gas management and adaptation to climate change have been added. In order to implement the requirements of "effectively integrating greenhouse gas emission control and climate change adaptation requirements into the transportation infrastructure construction process" in the "National Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change 2035" issued by our Ministry in conjunction with the National Development and Reform Commission and other 16 departments, the guidelines are for greenhouse gas emission control and adaptation. Relevant requirements have been put forward for adaptation to climate change.

Question: What enhanced requirements do the "Guidelines for Highway Environmental Assessment" put forward in terms of noise pollution prevention and control?

Answer:In order to effectively protect the ecological environment and public rights and interests along the route, we attached great importance to noise pollution in highway projects during the formulation of the "Highway Environmental Assessment Guidelines", and mainly proposed strict noise pollution prevention and control measures from the following aspects: First, we require scientific site selection. Route selection gives priority to avoiding environmental protection goals, and proposes planning and control requirements for noise compliance distance based on the impact during the operation period to minimize the affected acoustic environment protection goals; Second, in terms of prevention and control measures, priority is given to taking measures to control noise sources and transmission routes, and measures such as sound insulation, layout optimization, functional adjustment or demolition will be considered when necessary for acoustic environment protection goals. At the same time, further measures such as management, monitoring and noise prevention and control during construction can be taken. Third, when the current acoustic environment exceeds the standard, the noise problems related to the project should be solved together; if the noise problems are caused by the project and other factors outside the project, the traffic noise contribution value of the project should be mainly controlled, and relevant parties should be promoted in accordance with the provisions of the Law of the People's Republic of China on the Prevention and Control of Noise Pollution. Fourth, when the project evaluation scope involves ecologically sensitive areas whose main protection objects are wild animals and their habitats, it is proposed to adopt strengthened noise control requirements as required to strengthen the protection of wild animals and others.