On The Codification Of Environmental Law In China

In recent decades, various environmental issues have brought about environmental law’s booming in China that increasing environmental laws and regulations have formed a relatively complete legal system for environment. However, at the same time the development of the environmental legal system has reached an deadlock, which the more environmental laws and regulations are issued, the severer the environmental situation becomes. For how to solve this impasse, a large number of domestic environmental law scholars have drawn a lot of prescriptions. Some believe that we should develop the environmental basic law, and some think we should step over the basic stage to compile the environmental code directly. Ultimately, these studies are intended to solve the current problem that the environmental law system in China is lack of synthesis.For the indifferent dominance ability of the environmental basic law, to amend the Environmental Protection Law once more can neither fully adapt to the reality of our environmental law system nor pander to the development trend of the international environmental law. Obviously, the development space of the environmental basic law is relatively narrow. At the mean time, the traditional environmental code has its limits too. One of the main limits is that it would bind the update of environmental philosophy, and would solidify the development of environment legal system. More over, with our current legislation level it is difficult to compile a successful environmental code. In this context, a dynamic, opening, and relatively low-level environmental code, let us call it "halfway code", is more suited to our national conditions, and is a ideal option for our environmental legal system’s systematization.This paper is divided into four parts. After summarizing the environmental legal system of China with integrated analysis, the first part has evolved the defects of China’s environmental legal system and has drawn a conclusion that China’s environmental legal system need systematization. The second part is about the two methods to improve the environmental legislation--the environmental basic law method and the environmental codification method. The second part analyzes the pros and cons of the two methods,the advantages and disadvantages of the environmental code method, and defines the concepts of code and codification. The second part comes to a conclusion that the development space of basic law is narrow and the codification method has its own limitations and is faced with many obstacles. The third part proposes a remedy-- "moderate codification", namely a lower-level, open, dynamic codification, to overcome the limitations and practical obstacles of the traditional code. At the mean time, the third part discusses the rationality of the moderate codification, and also introduces a case of the moderate codification--the Environmental Code of Sweden. The fourth part expounds some matters that should be paid attention to in the process of codification, and proposes some tentative ideas on the framework of the environment code.