26/12/2017
Prevention, responses and remediation of environmental incidents are an important stipulation mentioned in Point 3, Chapter X of the Law on Environmental Protection 2014 and in other articles on environmental protection planning, strategic environmental assessment, environmental impact assessment, environmental protection plans, waste management, environmental monitoring and carrying capacity assessment, with an objective of preventing pollution and environmental incidents. These are important regulations of the Law on Environmental Protection 2014.
According to the definition of environmental incident, storms, flood, oil spills could be classified as environmental incidents. They all have respective preventing, combating and responding mechanisms. However, in practice, the regulations on prevention, response and remediation of environmental incidents have not been effective because the Law on Environmental Protection 2014 fails to provide detail and cover enough measures.
Therefore, it is necessary to revise and complement stipulations on prevention, responses and remediation of environmental incidents. This will influence other stipulations in the law, hence, help overcome the current shortcomings.
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| Untreated wastewater being discharged into the environment is a potential risk of environmental incidents |
Environmental Incident Prevention
To prevent environmental incidents, Article 108 of the Law on Environmental Protection 2014 stipulates responsibilities of business owners in environmental incident prevention with such measures as drafting a prevention and response plan, installing equipment, training for local responding task forces, regularly checking and supervising safety measures and applying cause removing measures when early signs of incidents are detected. In addition, the Law on Environmental Protection stipulates other environmental incidents’ related measures such as environmental protection planning, strategic environmental assessment, environmental impact assessment, waste management, carrying capacity assessment, disclosure of names of rivers whose carrying capacities have reached thresholds, discharging quota determination, environmental protection measures, environmental insurance, environmental rehabilitation and remediation deposit, environmental technical standards, environmental monitoring, environmental public disclosure, and supervision and inspection. These regulations are important in determining a location and technology of a project, controlling waste discharge, monitoring the operation of an entity and minimizing pollution or environmental incidents.
However, these regulations, in particular Article 108 of the LEP 2014 are yet detailed enough for covering environmental incident prevention. Therefore, the following measures for preventing environmental incidents will need to be studied:
Determining a list of potential seriously polluting establishments or establishments with high risks of environmental incidents to have suitable treatment for the projects which types of operations are in the list. The treatment should be legalized from the period of siting and zoning to environmental impact assessment, environmental management plans, environmental protection options. Suitable monitoring measures in the production and trade processes should be carried out with measures for responding to environmental incidents.
Applying Best Available Technology to achieve multiple objectives, including the objective of minimizing waste through best available technology taking into account the relationship between capacity of production and trade establishments and environmental protection requirements to maximize the effectiveness. The BAT application does not necessarily impose any specific technologies or techniques. Rather, it only requires considerations of technological features, geographical locations, environmental conditions, technical feasibility and costs. Therefore, it is necessary to determine application procedures, priorities and special conditions of production and trade establishments applying BAT.
Applying environmental audit to assess environmental compliance of production and trade establishments. In the meantime, it is necessary to apply a tool to study and check documents, data and environmental reports of production and trade establishments in certain time to detect environmental protection errors and violations. Environmental audit, by assessing production inputs and outputs provides clear evidence of pollution and environmental incidents of production and trade establishments. This is an important instrument to determine responsibilities for environmental compensation and environmental criminal of organizations and individuals causing environmental incidents.
Determining relationships between general national technical standards and sectoral national technical standards with the view that sectoral standards needs more stringent. Alternatively, local authorities are delegated to develop local technical standards for individual sectors and types of production and trade establishments in their localities.
Transparency of environmental information and environmental audit is necessary for controlling environmental violations and illegal discharging activities which potentially could lead to environmental incidents through community’s supervision and state management. In the meantime, it is necessary to improve roles of community, social organizations and state management authorities. This is important and effective to supervise environmental protection activities.
Regulating training and rehearsal on environmental incident prevention and responses. Because environmental incidents often occur suddenly, complicatedly and unexpectedly which cause fears and confusions among production and trade facilities as well as the surrounding community, training and rehearsal is necessary to provide timely actions.
Responding to environmental incidents
At present, mechanisms for responding to incidents and natural disasters are fairly complete, particularly thanks to the Government’s Decree 30/2017/ND-CP regulating organizations and activities related to responding to incidents, natural disasters and rescues. This covers environmental incidents. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the revision of the LEP 2014 in line with mechanisms in this decree. However, the decree only provide guidance on mechanisms for directing, advising, training and mobilizing resources when incidents happen without specifying contents and natures of different kinds of incidents. Therefore, mechanisms for responding to environmental incidents need specify:
Redefining environmental incidents to avoid overlaps with natural disaster incidents, chemical incidents, oil spills and fire because these types of incidents have been regulated in other documents. Environmental incidents should be defined as serious environmental degradation or change due to wastes from production, trade or other human activities or impact caused by artificial activities.
Developing criteria for classifying environmental incidents in accordance with different levels of jurisdictions in the system of responding to natural disasters and incidents and rescue so that the determination of who is in charge, advise and implement the responding actions can be done in a timely manner.
Clarifying roles, responsibilities and power of MONRE and DONRE, as this is not fully detailed in Decree 30/2017/ND-CP. It is also necessary to define special mechanisms to mobilize resources for responding to environmental incidents.
Environmental incident remediation
Environmental incidents can cause such damage as environmental damage (ecosystem degradation, environmental safety losses and environmental pollution), civil damage (health losses, safety dangers, income losses, property damage and negative impact on habitats and livelihood).
According to the “polluters pay” principle, individuals causing environmental incidents shall be responsible for their actions in terms of paying for compensation, civil damage, environmental incident remediation or criminal punishment. However, this principle is not fully realized in the LEP 2014. Therefore, the LEP 2014 needs to have the following additional elements:
For environmental damage, the LEP 2014 only addresses remediation in exploring and exploiting activities in mining, groundwater and in contaminated sites. These regulations however are yet complete. Therefore, it is necessary to issue regulations on remediation in which types and methods for remediation, rehabilitation, restoration are clearly defined. Based on these, costs for cleaning up and compensation can be determined. In the meantime, regulations on ensuring remediation responsibilities such as environmental deposit, environmental insurance, public participation, monitoring mechanisms and implementation arrangement need to be issued.
For civil damage, the LEP 2014 needs to be revised to include regulations on responsibilities for providing proven evidence in which the affected parties do not necessarily provide evidence for claiming for damage, but the environmental incident causing parties need to determine damage rates.
In sum, to respond to a new circumstance, it is expected that revision of the LEP 2014 and associated regulations on environmental incident prevention and responses will provide significant changes in improving environmental regulations to increase effectiveness of state management of environmental management.
Nguyễn Thi
Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment
