Integration of environmental impact assessment into decision-making process: practice of urban and rural planning in China

• To integrate PEIA with urban plan at both institutional and operational levels.
• To identify 10 decisive stages of urban & rural plan and corresponding stages of PEIA.
• To analyze the opportunities and challenges for PEIA in line with urban & rural plan.

In China, the development of plan environmental impact assessment (PEIA) has been greatly promoted and facilitated by the Law of the People's Republic of China on Environmental Impact Assessment (the EIA Law). Yet, the defects of PEIA rooted in the institutional design have emerged along with its progress and enhancement. Consequently, PEIA is usually excluded from the planning process and cannot play the essential role in promoting sustainable development, given that, for most of the non-environmental departments, PEIA is generally regarded as an external interference in executive power and eventually rejected. Hence, in order to improve and perfect PEIA in the future, it is strongly recommended that PEIA should be integrated with the decision-making system to fulfill the designed functions. Through urban and rural plan, the purpose of this study is to explore the opportunities and means to integrate PEIA with urban and rural plan at both the institutional and operational levels. The implementing framework for the integration of PEIA with urban and rural plan was first proposed, and ten important decision-making stages of the urban and rural plan process were identified as well as ten corresponding stages of PEIA. Additionally, the PEIA process was integrated with the decision-making process at several crucial stages to demonstrate the full integration of PEIA with urban and rural plan.