Staff members patrol Tiantang Lake by boat to safeguard the aquatic ecological environment in Anqing, East China's Anhui Province, on August 16, 2026. Photo: VCG

Editor's Note:

China's landmark Ecological and Environmental Code (EEC) officially took effect on Saturday. As the world's first code specifically dedicated to the ecological environment, its enactment ushers in a new phase of more systematic and rule-based ecological and environmental protection in China. To explore this legislation's landmark implications, institutional innovations, implementation outlook and value for global reference, the Global Times invited three overseas scholars to share their professional insights covering paradigmatic flaws within mainstream international environmental governance, how integrated legal frameworks translate ecological aspirations into actionable governance, as well as practical lessons for developing countries and the relevance for South-South cooperation.

Eduardo Tzili-Apango, professor at the Department of Politics and Culture of the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico

China's EEC emerged from a convergence of mounting environmental pressures, institutional fragmentation and growing dissatisfaction with the limited effectiveness of global climate governance. The EEC brings pollution prevention, ecological conservation, green and low-carbon development, climate action, and legal responsibility within a unified normative architecture. This reflects more than an effort to consolidate previously dispersed legislation, as it embodies an attempt to redefine the ecological problem itself and to furnish environmental governance with a new ontological horizon.

The persistent insufficiency of international environmental action cannot be explained solely by inadequate financing, weak enforcement or deficient political coordination. It also results from the dominant meaning assigned to nature within the contemporary liberal order. Environmental deterioration has generally been understood as an externality produced by otherwise legitimate economic activity. Within this framework, ecological governance seeks to correct market failures without fundamentally reconsidering the separation between the economy, society and nature. Carbon markets, technological innovation, voluntary commitments and regulatory incentives may mitigate particular consequences. However, they rarely challenge the ontological assumptions underlying environmentally destructive patterns of production and consumption. Nature remains an object to be administered, priced, exploited or repaired, rather than the constitutive condition of collective existence.

The Chinese EEC points toward a different understanding. By placing the harmonious coexistence of humanity and nature at the center of ecological modernization, it legally institutionalizes the idea that environmental protection is a foundational principle of social, economic and political organization. Pollution, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, ecological security and climate change consequently cease to appear as separate technical difficulties. They become interconnected manifestations of a systemic imbalance within the relationship between human development and the natural world.

This reconceptualization gives new meaning to the global public good of the environment, because it is no longer treated merely as a desirable outcome to be supplied through the aggregation of discrete national contributions. In fact, it is understood as a community of life whose integrity makes every other public good possible. Thus, the EEC identifies the objects requiring protection, the authorities responsible for safeguarding them, the social actors involved in their reproduction and the institutional mechanisms through which ecological obligations can be translated into collective action. In doing so, it converts ecological civilization from a political narrative into a legally organized structure of meaning.

The institutionalization of this ontology constitutes a fundamental first step to guarantee ecological transformation because consequential action requires a prior redefinition of what is considered real, valuable and politically necessary. By challenging the liberal representation of environmental damage as a correctable side effect of economic growth, the code opens the possibility of treating ecological integrity as the normative foundation of development itself. Therefore, its most significant contribution may lie in providing a new ecological horizon from which more concrete, forceful and consequential responses to climate change can become both imaginable and institutionally possible.

Andrew Schwartz, co-founder of the Institute for Ecological Civilization based in the US

China's new EEC signals an important evolution in environmental governance. Ecological problems are interconnected. Our systems of governance must become interconnected too. Climate change cannot be separated from energy, biodiversity from agriculture, or pollution from production and consumption. By bringing pollution prevention, ecological conservation, climate action, and green and low-carbon development into a more integrated legal framework, the EEC begins to align the structure of environmental governance with the interconnected structure of ecological reality itself.

Integration is only part of the story. The EEC also moves environmental governance upstream - from managing environmental damage toward transforming the systems that produce it. Its emphasis on circular economy, cleaner production and energy transition reflects this larger ambition. We cannot merely manage the consequences of an unsustainable model of development. We must transform the model itself.

Vision must also be translated into institutions. Ecological civilization cannot remain only an aspiration or guiding philosophy. Long-term transformation requires laws, standards, incentives, accountability and institutions capable of turning ecological values into everyday practice. The EEC helps bridge the distance between long-term ecological goals and near-term governance, translating broad commitments into legal responsibilities, standards, enforcement mechanisms and frameworks for implementation.

The scale of China's ambition makes this especially significant. China has made a commitment to reaching peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060. Transforming the energy and economic systems that support more than a billion people is an extraordinary undertaking. If China succeeds in creating a prosperous carbon-neutral society at this scale, it would demonstrate that ecological civilization can move from aspiration to lived reality at the scale of a modern industrial society. The new EEC helps build the legal architecture needed to pursue that transformation.

This also explains the EEC's potential value globally. Other countries cannot simply copy China. Their legal systems, ecological conditions and development needs differ. But China's experience can provide an important reference. What is transferable is not necessarily a particular regulation, but a principle: interconnected challenges require integrated forms of governance.

Ecological civilization is ultimately a global project, with many possible pathways. The challenge before every society is not simply to protect the environment from development, but to transform development so that people and planet can flourish together.

Douglas de Castro, Brazilian professor of International Law at the School of Law, Lanzhou University

China's EEC is a revolutionary milestone in Chinese jurisprudence and in the quest of developing countries for sustainable development. It is a representation of China's civilizational commitment to upholding the rule of law, implementing high-quality development and building a community with a shared future for humanity. It operationalizes the constitutional provision of Ecological Civilization.

For developing economies, the central governance challenge has always been how to balance the goals of poverty reduction, industrial development and environmental protection. China's moderate codification approach offers a pragmatic middle ground. The Code does not consider ecological protection as a penalty on economic output, but has taken an unprecedented step by establishing an independent section on Green and Low-carbon Development. The EEC directly regulates green industrial transformation in its primary regulatory architecture by codifying circular economy standards, product carbon footprint tracking and institutionalized ecological compensation. It offers developing countries a statutory formula for shifting from end-of-pipe pollution control to green productivity at the source, which increases both economic and environmental security for people.

In the past, environmental governance in many Western jurisdictions developed reactively, through piecemeal, single-medium statutes (for instance, separate acts for air, water and waste). That often led to overlapping jurisdictions, regulatory gaps and vulnerability to partisan rollback. Conversely, China's codification systematically consolidates and upgrades more than a dozen standalone environmental statutes into a single cohesive framework. The EEC provides a comprehensive General Provisions section and unified systems for environmental impact assessments, zoning controls and administrative liability, thereby reducing statutory friction and ensuring regulatory continuity. This systemic model is particularly instructive for developing nations where administrative resources are scarce and institutional coordination is essential.

Global environmental norms have largely been based on the post-industrial realities of developed countries, leading to an unprecedented cascade of interconnected crises, including climate change, biodiversity loss, inequality and extreme poverty. China's EEC shows how a fast-modernizing country can proactively codify peak-carbon and carbon-neutrality targets, along with biodiversity and risk-management frameworks for new pollutants. The code is an adaptable legislative instrument within the framework of South-South cooperation. In this regard, the EEC's normativity can be exported through the Green Belt and Road Initiative and other Chinese initiatives (for instance, Brazil stands out in Latin America as a major recipient of green financing from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank). It enables developing countries to build capacity together, harmonize regional green supply chain standards and speak with one voice in multilateral climate and biodiversity diplomacy.