Korea

The central government will simplify the system for controlling pollution-generating facilities starting from 2017 as part of its efforts to reduce unnecessary procedural issues and lessen the burdens of businesses, officials said Tuesday.

For this, the Environment Ministry said it would integrate pollution permit systems. Currently, up to 10 types of separate permissions are required to run one pollution-generating facility. The permissions range from air pollution to water quality.

The new system will allow companies to submit only one online document for facility approval.

The government and ruling party decided Tuesday to loosen a new regulation that requires companies to register chemical substances, in the face of strong backlash from businesses.

During a policy consultation, the Ministry of Environment and the ruling Saenuri Party agreed to exempt chemicals used in small amounts or used for research and development purposes from the requirement, which will come into force in late 2014.

This review is prepared as part of the FAO Project “Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and monitoring in aquaculture”. The review provides a compilation, review and synthesis of existing EIA and environmental monitoring procedures and practices in aquaculture in the Asia-Pacific region, the largest aquaculture-producing region in the world. This review, as in other regions, gives special consideration to four areas related to EIA and monitoring in aquaculture including: (1) the requirements (2) the practice (3) the effectiveness and (4) suggestions for improvements.

This paper provides an overview of key elements of a number of different countries’ Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedures. These elements will be compared to the current EIA process of the Philippines in order to draw out lessons for possible improvement. The EIAs reviews are from the following countries: China, Japan, Malaysia, Republic of Korea, United States, and the regional regime in the European Union (EU). The paper also includes a brief discussion of the value of EIA in the international context, and reflections on assessing the effectiveness and cost of EIAs.

A powerpoint presentation from Young-Il Song of the Korea Environment Institute (KEI)

Environmental Impact Assessment(EIA)

• Adopted in 1977 under the Environment Preservation Act
• Currently, being enforced under the Act on Assessment of Impacts of Works on Environment, Traffic, Disaster, ETC
• Applied to the development projects (17 Fields 63 Projects)

Preliminary Environmental Review System(PERS)

Wind power plant as a renewable energy is getting popular, so there is social conflict on the site selection of wind power plant. As over 70% of Korea is composed of mountainous landscape, many wind power plants are proposed to be built on mountain ridge and are expected to cause serious environmental problems. The operating wind power plant and the proposed EIA cases of wind power plant show the examples of the expected environmental problems and social conflicts.

Korea adopted the EIA system, which was then titled “prior consultations”, in 1977 with the enactment of the Environmental Conservation Act. It was then introduced in full scale in 1981 when the “Regulations on Preparing the EIA Report” were legislated. Over the past 25 years since being introduced, EIA has served as an effective program for protecting the environment while inciting awareness of environment-friendly development to development executors (institutions) as well as promoting the importance of environmental conservation to the public.

When the fully laden VLCC HEBEI SPIRIT was struck on her port side by a crane barge in poor weather conditions on 7th December off the coast of the Republic of Korea, it quickly became apparent that the incident would be serious. Indeed, together with the SOLAR 1 in the Philippines in 2006, the TASMAN SPIRIT in Pakistan in 2003 and the PRESTIGE off Galicia in 2002, the HEBEI SPIRIT ranks as one of the largest tanker spills of recent years.