"13th Five-Year" will levy tax on environmental protection: environmental governance upgrades once a

In November 15^th, the State Council held the executive meeting, and agreed the planning to strengthen three weak links of poverty alleviation, poverty alleviation through education, and environmental protection in the 13th Five-Year plan according to the national economic and social development.

According to the Economic Information Daily in November 17th, the meeting pointed out that promoting the construction of ecological civilization is a major national strategy, and also what people are eager for. The meeting also agreed the "13th Five-Year environmental protection plan", which identified the following tasks: one is to strengthen the control of the sources. Complete the delineation of ecological protection red line; improve environmental standards and technology policy system; eliminate process, equipment and products of high-pollution and high environmental risk. Develop key technology of resource saving and cycling, and ecological management restoration of complete sets of technology; accelerate the development of energy-saving and environmental protection industry. The two is to vigorously implement pollution prevention plan on atmosphere, water and soil; take improving environmental quality as the core, and implement overall emission control in key areas, watershed, and industry; accelerate the implementation of a number of major environmental protection projects; carry out pollution control and emission reduction management on 15 key industries including papermaking, building materials; carry out plan of industrial pollution sources fully reaching the emission standard; take comprehensive measures to control rural pollution from non-pointsources and pollution from livestock and poultry farming. Promote the protection and restoration in key areas and important ecosystems, and build a network of biodiversity conservation. Three is to strengthen the overall management and control on the risk of heavy metals, hazardous waste, toxic and hazardous chemicals. The four is to improve systems including enterprise emissions permits, emission trading, compensation for environmental damage, and establish a diversified and cross-regional ecological compensation mechanism, strengthen environmental supervision and law enforcement, timely levy tax on environmental protection, deepen the price reform of resource and environment, build a green financial system, building a beautiful China.

It is reported that the potential market of China's environmental protection industry is huge, which is expected to become China's new economic growth point. It is also expected that in the "13th Five-Year" period annual growth rate of China's environmental protection industry will exceed 20%, and the total investment is expected to reach 17 trillion yuan. However, at present, China has become the world's first carbon emission and resource consumption country. Environmental protection situation is still severe, while problems like heavy environmental pollution, great ecological damage and high environmental risk have become the bottleneck of China's social and economic sustainable and healthy development, and atmosphere, water, soil pollution has not been effectively alleviated.

Researcher from China Minsheng Bank Research Institute Wu Qi said that the ecological environment protection and the construction of the beautiful China need to rely on the legal system and market mechanism. First, speed up the environmental legislation and implement the most stringent environmental protection system. Although China has promulgated the "ten-point plan" about atmosphere, water and soil, the framework of the environmental protection law system has not been established, the quality of legislation and supervision and implementation of  regulation have yet needed to be further strengthened. Subsequently further improve the environmental protection laws and regulations and strengthen law enforcement aiming at key areas of atmosphere, water, soil and hazardous waste. Next, promote environmental governance through the market mechanism. For a long time, concepts like environment is valueless and has no cost led to the tragedy that the ecological environment became public land in our country. And the market mechanism is an effective way to solve the problem of China's inadequate investment in environmental protection, low investment returns and deepening environmental pollution. As an important means of internalization of the external effects of the environment, enterprise emission permits and emissions trading are more suitable for our country's environmental protection market.

Many experts believe that China's current sewage charging system is not perfect, the market is not active in the emission trading, and the supervision the sewage permit brought to the sewage unit has failed to reach the expectation. Therefore, the next stage should focus on the emissions trading construction of technology support system, long-term policy mechanism and reasonable emission trading market, to promote improvement work on the enterprise emissions permits, emission trading system.

It is worth mentioning that the environmental protection draft has been sent to the National People's Congress for consideration. According to the draft, the taxpayers for environmental tax are enterprises, public institutions and any other producers that discharge taxable pollutants directly into the environment in territory of the People's Republic of China and other sea areas under the jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China. Taxable pollutants are atmospheric pollutants, water pollutants, solid waste and noise. Some experts said that the environmental protection tax set sewage charge standard as a lower limit, which means that the tax rate is higher than that of the current sewage charges. Environmental tax each year is expected to scale up to about 50000000000 yuan in theory after the levy.