On 11 March, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the Ministry of Justice of the People’s Republic of China jointly issued the document “Opinions on Speeding up Establishing Legal and Policy System for Green Production and Consumption”, which aims to improve current laws and regulations, and facilitate green production and consumption nationally.

The document raises the following main goal: By the year of 2025, regulations, standards and policies related to green production and consumption should be further improved and strengthened, and a system with effective encouraging and constraining rules should be basically completed. Green production and consumption will be implemented on a national scale in key areas, industries and processes, to fulfill China’s overall improvement of green development.

To achieve the 2025 goal, the document highlighted 27 key tasks to be carried out in 9 areas, including promoting green design, strengthening industrial clean production, developing industrial circular economy, reinforcing industrial pollution control, facilitating energy clean development and other areas. Tasks were clearly assigned to different ministries and authorities to implement, including NDRC, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR). MEE will be responsible for completing and improving the priority control chemical inventory, introducing policies and measures to further promote mandatory clean production auditing in key industries, speeding up the development of feasible technical guidelines for pollution prevention and control, and other related tasks.

According to the requests laid out in the document, ministries and authorities should perform their duties to facilitate formulating and revising laws and regulations, standards, policies related to green production and consumption, which should also be adapted and implemented at local level. Fiscal, tax and revenue, and financial departments at all levels should accordingly improve relevant supporting policies in long term. Publicity and communication on green production and consumption needs to be implemented by communication departments at different levels.