Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 243

of production processes and available data on production levels and
outputs. But in practice the system shows many shortcomings. Only a
small fraction of the forms sent out is returned. Because of limitations
in manpower (with only 5 persons working in the fee collection division
of HEPA for the whole city, and some part-time work of staff in the
district environmental boards) the filled-in forms are hardly corrected
and the firms that have not sent in their forms are hardly reminded or
prosecuted. The end result is a very low level of fee collection at the
city level. Outside the main urban-industrial nodes, industrial emission
monitoring is even less systematic and data are hardly available even
for governmental agencies and research institutes. But remarkably the
fee collection is better, due to lower levels of industrialization and thus
lower work loads of the environmental authorities.
The alternative for low levels of actual monitoring of emissions
would be model calculations based on more general parameters. How-
ever, the availability of environmental data based on modelling and
calculations is poor, due to the lack of information and knowledge on
data that need to feed models on emission calculations, such as produc-
tion process characteristics, production volumes, emission parameters,
natural resource use, energy and water use, etc. Most environmental
data follow still from place-based sampling and monitoring, which
happens incidentally and not in a structural and systematic way over
longer time periods.

Monitoring in China

China differs in some respects from Vietnam in environmental monitor-
ing, data collection and availability and transparency of environmental
data. Systematic data collection programmes on environmental quality
have been extensive and national environmental information is more
widely available, especially through the Internet. If we compare the
Web sites of the Chinese State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA)
with the Vietnamese NEPA, 8

or the statistical annual environmental

8

See http://www.sepa.gov.cn for China (and http://www.zhb.gov.cn/english/SOE
for the English versions of the annual State of the Environment reports) and
http://www.nea.gov.vn for Vietnam (and
http://www.nea.gov.vn/english/state.htm for the English version of the State of
the Environment report 2001 and recent monitoring data). From 2005 onwards,
the China Environmental Yearbook also has been published in English.