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How China's new environmental code translates national ecological goals into everyday rules_我的网站

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    Herds of elk graze in the foreground of a lush wetland in Yancheng, East China's Jiangsu Province, while rows of wind turbines turn gracefully against the distant sky on July 16, 2026. Photo: VCG Editor's Note: 
"Building an ecological civilization concerns the well-being of the people and the future of the nation." 

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, once pointed out: "Respecting, adapting to, and protecting nature is essential for building China into a modern socialist country in all respects."
In the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) for national economic and social development, securing major breakthroughs in strategic tasks of overall importance to Chinese modernization and making major new progress in the Beautiful China Initiative are key objectives.
The Global Times is launching a series of articles titled "BeautifulChinaING." From the perspectives of the beauty of nature, the beauty of systems and the beauty of lifestyles, the series uses both Chinese and international cases as entry points. Through field reporting and video storytelling, it explores how green development has become a defining feature of Chinese modernization while showcasing China's role as a responsible major country providing global public goods. 
In this installment, we turn our focus to China's Ecological and Environmental Code and the changes it may bring to everyday life. From neighborhood noise and restaurant fumes to ecological conservation and green development, this article examines how the code brings scattered environmental rules into a unified framework, strengthens public participation and turns the vision of a Beautiful China into concrete rules for environmental governance.
A power drill starts in a neighboring apartment just as someone is trying to sleep. Cooking fumes from the restaurant downstairs drift through an open window. A modified car roars past a residential compound, while a food delivery arrives wrapped in layers of plastic. According to China's new Ecological and Environmental Code, these seemingly minor, everyday frictions - closely tied to how people live, sleep, cook, commute and consume - are precisely where environmental governance begins.
The code will take effect on Saturday. Spanning 1,242 articles across five books, it is China's second law to be formally titled a "code," following the Civil Code. It brings pollution control, ecological conservation and green and low-carbon development under one legal framework, while incorporating 10 existing laws.
Speaking at a press conference held on Thursday, Minister of Ecology and Environment Li Gao said that the Ecological and Environmental Code is of major and far-reaching significance for safeguarding the public's ecological and environmental rights and interests in accordance with the law, consolidating the legal foundation for building a Beautiful China, and accelerating modernization characterized by harmony between humanity and nature.
As China puts the vast environmental code into force, a practical question arises: How will it make daily life quieter, cleaner and easier to navigate - and turn the vision of a Beautiful China into rules that people can see, use and help enforce?
From doorsteps to ecosystems
    Young students at a primary school in Hai'an, Jiangsu Province, study the Ecological and Environmental Code during a class session on June 3, 2026. Photo: VCG The Ecological and Environmental Code reaches far beyond everyday urban concerns, covering ecological conservation and public participation in environmental governance.
In Mengla county, Southwest China's Yunnan Province, elephant ranger Li Shengqian once walked through a large area of flattened cornfields. While local rangers were attending training, more than 40 wild Asian elephants descended from the mountains, ate the ripe sweet corn, rolled in a mineral-rich pond and then retreated into the forest to sleep. 
A local forestry official told the Global Times that an insurance company would assess the damage and compensate the villagers.
Yunnan has gradually turned such compensation from an improvised response into an institutional arrangement. Under its wildlife-damage public liability insurance system, governments pay the premiums, affected farmers do not contribute, and insurers assess and compensate their losses. 
By August 2024, Xishuangbanna had invested 225 million yuan ($33.3 million) in the scheme and paid 215 million yuan in compensation for wildlife damage, including 188 million yuan for losses caused by Asian elephants.
The code gives such practices a clearer legal foundation. Article 828 requires local governments in areas seriously affected by wildlife damage to combine compensation with preventive measures, including protective barriers, warning signs and monitoring and early-warning systems. It also stipulates compensation for deaths, injuries and losses to crops or other property resulting from the protection of specified wildlife. In this way, the cost of conservation is not left solely to those living closest to protected animals.
For environmental volunteers, the change may be felt in a different way. Yun Jianli founded the Green Hanjiang environmental group in Central China's Hubei Province in 2002 and has spent more than two decades investigating pollution along the Hanjiang River. 
Yun said volunteers previously often had difficulty dealing with legal matters. "When dealing with some environmental issues, we often had to search across different laws to find a legal basis," she told the Global Times. "The new code integrates these systems, providing clearer and more authoritative legal support for environmental actions."
That support extends beyond a general recognition of participation. The code requires public consultations in environmental planning, standard-setting and impact assessments; mandates accessible reporting channels and feedback for real-name reports; and prohibits employers from retaliating against workers who report pollution by their own organizations. 
For volunteers such as Yun, public participation is therefore no longer only an appeal to civic responsibility. It is positioned as a legally protected part of environmental governance.
After Saturday, the code's practical effect will be tested in equally concrete ways.
From blueprint to reality
Turning this wide breadth of laws into a single code requires more than collecting existing statutes. Lawmakers first had to decide which rules should be fully integrated, which specialized laws should remain in place and where new legal foundations were needed. 
Compilation formally began on November 3, 2023. A leadership group coordinated major issues, a drafting task force handled the text, and an expert committee provided specialist input. The draft was reviewed twice as a whole and twice in separate books before it was adopted on March 12, 2026, completing a process of nearly two and a half years.
The approach was described as "moderate codification." Huang Wei, a deputy director of the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee and coordinator of the drafting task force, told the People's Daily that the aim was not to absorb every environmental law into one volume. Instead, different groups of laws were treated differently.
Ten laws covering environmental protection, environmental impact assessment, cleaner production and major forms of pollution control were revised and incorporated in full, and will no longer remain as separate statutes once the code takes effect. Core provisions from more than 20 other laws involving forests, grasslands, major river basins, national parks, energy and resource conservation were included while those laws were retained. For newer fields such as climate governance and the carbon-peaking and carbon-neutrality goals, the code establishes guiding principles while leaving room for more detailed legislation.
The code was also shaped outside meeting rooms in Beijing. In May 2025, Chinese and international students at a vocational university in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality discussed the draft, with their suggestions sent to the national legislature through a grassroots legislative contact point, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, also took part in seminars organized by the Legislative Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee and other departments during the code's drafting. His organization later submitted detailed proposals when the draft was released for public comment, he told the Global Times.
"The open legislative process was significant in itself, as it prompted broad public discussion of decades of environmental legislation and the major issues of our time," Ma said. "It has enabled the code to engage with cutting-edge international legislative theories while remaining grounded in the practical challenges China faces," Ma said.
During the four rounds of public consultation, more than 7,000 people participated and submitted over 20,000 comments. The drafting team conducted research in more than 30 localities and held 17 seminars in Beijing with national legislators, government departments, companies, social organizations and scholars, the People's Daily reported. 
Suggestions from the public and grassroots contact points helped shape rules on emerging pollutants, urban greening, climate governance and legal liability. Following deliberations at the final NPC session, more than 200 additional changes were made, including over 100 substantive revisions, Xinhua reported.
Passing the code, however, did not automatically align the many rules beneath it. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment said it was reviewing more than 500 related documents, including over 30 administrative regulations, more than 80 departmental rules and over 400 normative documents. Provisions that conflict with, fail to connect with or no longer fit the code will be revised or repealed, while supporting rules and technical standards are being updated.
Innovative tools have also been used in preparation for the code's implementation. An AI-assisted system has been developed to address the difficulties and high costs involved in assessing ecological and environmental damage. The system has been piloted free of charge in 28 provincial-level regions and applied in more than 300 cases, reducing average assessment time by over 80 percent, according to the ministry.
Wider legal practice
Environmental codification is not unique to China. Sweden adopted its Environmental Code in 1998 and brought together rules previously contained in 15 acts. It then entered into force on January 1, 1999. France issued the legislative part of its Environmental Code in September 2000. Germany also attempted to establish a unified environmental code, but the project stalled in 2009.
In terms of the Ecological and Environmental Code of China, an article published in the international journal Carbon Research described it as a systemic response to the interconnected crises of pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change, while also identifying incomplete supporting rules, uneven legal coordination and limited public awareness as implementation challenges.
An editorial by the People's Daily published on Thursday noted that the enactment of the Ecological and Environmental Code signifies a major transformation in China from a participant to a leader in global environmental governance, providing a legislative model that can be studied by countries around the world, especially developing countries.
Lu Weifu, a researcher at the University of Science and Technology of China, wrote in an article published by China Environment News that the code's distinctive feature lies in combining systematic integration with an open structure. Unlike environmental codes primarily shaped around conventional pollution control, China's code places pollution prevention, ecological conservation and green and low-carbon development within the same framework. Its separate book on green and low-carbon development also brings climate change and economic transformation into the core structure of environmental law.
Ma said that conventional air-pollution control and climate governance had long operated in relatively separate legal systems. By connecting the control of conventional pollutants with reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, he said, the code could support more coordinated regulation and reduce duplicated systems and administrative work. 
The larger shift is from dealing with environmental harm only after it occurs to addressing how energy, industry and consumption generate that harm in the first place, he said.
    Residents enjoy leisure activities at a sports park transformed from a sand pit left behind by years of unregulated mining in Qionghai, South China's Hainan Province, on August 12, 2026. Photo: VCG After the code takes effect, most people will never read all 1,242 articles. They will encounter it through more practical tests: Whether environmental information can be found, whether a complaint receives a response, whether a polluter repairs the damage and whether a river or neighborhood becomes measurably cleaner. 
That is where this wide-ranging legal experiment returns to the scale at which environmental protection is ultimately felt - the life outside a person's window.
。    【环球网报道 记者 陈全 实习生 邱梓凡】据英国《卫报》近日报道，随着人工智能加速发展，如何避免所在职业被人工智能取代成为初入职场年轻人面临的现实问题。多位来自医疗、教育、法律、酒店、建筑和金融等行业的专家在接受采访时表述，AI可能会在短时间内改变部分岗位的工作方式，但无法完全取代人类从事这些工作。对此，专家建议称，选择涉及专业判断、人际互动、照护服务、创意表达和动手实践等方面的职业，可有效降低被AI取代的风险，从而拓宽未来职业发展空间。         图片来源：视觉中国          专家指出，受AI影响较大、且容易被其取代的职业往往具有工作内容高度标准化、过于依赖表格记录与文档处理功能等共同特征。

二 | 在医疗行业中，医疗秘书、药房支持、处方处理和呼叫处理团队等符合以上特征的岗位可能会最先被AI所取代；而涉及到对患者安全和治疗方案负责的岗位，如医生、护士、药剂师和其他有处方权的临床人员则很难被AI替代。英国奥什克药房（Oushk Pharmacy）联合创始人、主管药剂师希拉·马利克（Hira Malik）表示，AI可以帮助医师整理信息并提示可能潜在的风险，但它不能代替医师决定某种治疗是否安全或适合每一名患者。整形与重建外科医生里亚兹·阿加（Riaz Agha）同样认为，一些高度个性化的医疗服务同样难以完全被AI取代。他同时建议称，未来从业医师应学会正确使用AI并充分理解其优势和局限，以适应AI对这一行业带来的变化。         银行和金融业部分岗位也同样面临这一问题。

三 | 彭博行业研究（Bloomberg Intelligence）高级银行业分析师托马什·诺策尔（Tomasz Noetzel）表示，与医疗行业类似，银行与金融企业中呼叫中心、客户服务、中台运营、零售网点和IT支持等涉及大量重复性任务的岗位容易受到AI影响并逐渐被其取代；而数据科学家、AI工程师、软件开发人员等技术和数据相关岗位则受到的影响较小。

四 | 诺策尔认为，几乎没有银行岗位会不受AI影响，但高度依赖专业判断的岗位，如研究分析师、合规和监控分析师、风险建模专家、内部审计师等会相对更具有韧性，也更容易为从业者提供未来发展空间。

五 |          除上述两个行业外，教育和早教领域同样被认为具有较强“人类属性”从而无法被AI完全替代。专家表示，在教育领域，AI同样可能会涉足行政和常规教学辅助工作，但很难取代教师与学生之间的信任关系。

六 | “从职业选择角度来看，成为教师是一个很好的选择。学生总是需要值得信任的成年人际关系来帮助他们学习。”牛津大学代际成功实验室（Generational Success Lab）创始人沙拉斯·吉万（Sharath Jeevan）认为。

七 | 此外，儿童照护领域也被视为AI较难接管的领域。儿童照护机构蒂尼（Tiney）创始人布雷特·威格多茨（Brett Wigdortz）表示，虽然AI可以支持沟通和组织工作，但家长“更希望由一个真人来照顾他们的孩子”，而非冰冷的电脑程序。随着未来托育需求持续存在，儿童看护、托儿所管理、高端保姆和家教等岗位仍拥有强劲的市场需求和较好的收入潜力，为人们提供保持高需求、高灵活的就业机遇。

八 |          专家还指出，AI同样也会法律业初级岗位产生复杂影响。随着AI降低法律服务成本，律师助理和初级律师等承担了文件审查、起草初稿、整理资料和填写表格任务的岗位在一定程度上会受到AI冲击，但着也将为这些岗位从业者带来另一种机遇。

九 | 来自英国线上法律服务公司法律蜂巢（Lawhive）的皮埃尔·普罗纳（Pierre Proner）分析，初级法律岗位在人工智能时代并不会消失，只是其工作内容可能会产生一定变化。初级律师可能不用再将时间花在重复性的法律和行政工作上，而是能更早接触法律判断、客户沟通以及对AI生成结果的监督任务。英格兰及威尔士律师协会副会长布雷特·迪克森（Brett Dixon）评价称，这一改变将会为初级律师创造更多的时间和机会，从而使其获得深入思考复杂法律问题的能力。不过，普罗纳也提醒称，法律行业未来面临的挑战之一，是当传统初级任务被AI接管后，法律机构如何重新设计从初级律师到高级律师的成长路径。他认为当下对于法律毕业生而言，熟练掌握AI应用可能会和过去会用Word和Excel等办公软件一样重要。         酒店业专家也强调称，AI无法取代酒店高质量服务中的人际连接。葡萄牙诺瓦商学院威斯蒙特旅游与酒店研究所（The Westmont Institute of Tourism and Hospitality at Nova School of Business and Economics）学术主任格雷厄姆·米勒教授（Prof.Graham Miller）表示，AI可以通过处理邮件回复等后台任务的方式，让员工把更多精力放在与客人面对面沟通中，从而为客人提供真正温暖、周到、有人情味的服务。他还强调称，酒店内一些具有创意性的岗位，如主厨等受到AI影响较小，而重复性较强的餐饮操作，例如翻汉堡、制作披萨等，未来可能更容易被自动化取代。换言之，AI可能不会淘汰所有服务岗位，但会提高对从业者“真正创造力”和“真实体验感”的要求。

十 | 最后，对于土木及建筑行业而言，砌砖、木工和抹灰等动手型岗位因其技能壁垒从而免受AI冲击，并将继续为社会提供长期职业机会；而相比之下，土木行业中规划、估算等白领和行政岗位，则可能更早被AI替代。英国建筑大师联合会（Federation of Master Builders）首席执行官布莱恩·贝里（Brian Berry）呼吁，随着熟练技工岗位在AI时代展现出愈发强力的韧性，当今社会对技工职业的认知应有所改变。“调查显示，目前只有47%的父母会建议孩子从事建筑行业。而随着建筑行业在AI时代提供了一条有回报、面向未来的职业路径，我们也希望将有更多人考虑从事这一方面的职业。”贝里表示。

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