Five regional supervision centres will be set up in China to improve administration in tackling serious environmental problems on the provincial, autonomous region and municipality level, People's Daily reported.

The centres will be located in five provincial capitals: the East centre in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province; the South centre, in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province; the Northwest centre, in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province; the Southwest centre, in Chengdu, Sichuan Province; and the Northeast centre, in Shenyang, Liaoning Province.

Accountable to the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), the regional centres will supervise local environmental protection bureaux, co-ordinate trans-boundary issues, investigate serious accidents and deal with emergencies.

However, they will not interfere with or guide the regular work of those departments, the report quoted Zhang Shaomin, SEPA construction director, as saying.

Construction of the regional centres tops SEPA's working agenda this year. The State Council approved SEPA's proposal to establish the centres in September last year. Staff recruitment and the opening of the centres are scheduled to be done before the end of the year.

Calls to deal with cross-boundary environmental issues have been issued in China for years, and the chemical spill that fouled the Songhua River last November only made the cries louder.

The operational mistake that caused about 100 tons of toxic material to escape into the river was by a chemical factory in Jilin Province, but residents downstream in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang Province, had to shut off their water for four days, arousing mountains of complaints.

That accident was the most serious in recent memory but certainly not isolated. Provincial environmental protection bureaux have no jurisdiction outside their boundaries, and the environmental protection department in Heilongjiang Province has often complained that if pollution can't be reduced in Jilin, then the effectiveness of the whole programme along the Songhua River will be undermined.

What's more, similar cases, especially concerning water pollution, are common across China.

"Besides co-ordinating transboundary environmental problems, setting up regional supervision centres will help stop local interference and increase the likelihood that penalties will really be enforced," said Zhang Jianyu, project manager of US-based Environmental Defence in Beijing.

"As SEPA's extended arm, these centres will make sure that local EPBs are doing their jobs and not yielding to local pressures when it comes to conflicts between development and environmental protection. The centres will create the pressure to actually have environmental laws and penalties upheld."

Source: China Daily