The “Plan” for environmental services is basically finalized.

 The reporter was also informed, “the Twelfth Five-Year development plan for environmental services” which led by Ministry of Environmental Protection was basically finalized. As the sub-plan of “the Twelfth Five-Year energy saving and environmental protection industry development plan”, it will proceed with demonstration project, industrial standard and industrial alliances, plans to propose that environmental services accounting for the proportion of the environmental protection industry increase dramatically from the current 15% to 30% during Twelfth Five-Year. But an expert who participated in the organization of above mentioned plan said, the emphasis on “contracting environmental services” in the plan was not enough.

 Contracting environmental service mode means that the pollution discharge enterprises or local government purchase specific environmental service from service provider by signing contract and pay relevant cost according to environmental effects. Ministry of Environmental Protection has repeatedly stressed that the contracting environmental services and emission reduction management were the many business modes for environmental services.

 The technology standard Secretary of the Ministry of Environmental Protection Zhaoying Min said, the contract for environmental services can solve the problem of high enforcement cost, low illegal cost. “Once the integrated environmental service providers discharged pollutions illegally, their honesty and capital which accumulated over the years would be gone. So cooperate with such enterprises, the environmental problems will be improved greatly.”

 However, person from NDRC are not optimistic on this point. He said, energy saving could promote the enterprises saving electricity, water and coal to produce tangible economic benefit, contracting energy management could create “win-win” for energy conservation service and energy consumption enterprises; but emission reduction would reduce the economic benefits of the enterprises, they did not have the incentive to buy the contracting environmental services.

 He thought that the environmental protection industry need policy driving, in order to solve the purchasing incentive problem of contracting environmental services, the only way was to strengthen legalization and enforcement of environmental protection, solve the old problems of “high cost for abiding by the law, low cost for breaking the law”, and force the enterprises to buy the environmental services.