Environmental Audit Of The Environmental Audit Content - Discussing The Definition

Environmental protection is conscious activities carried out by human beings in order to protect their habitat, develop and utilize natural resources in a reasonable manner, prevent pollution and other public hazards and ensure human existence and development. China is a developing country. When implementing the national strategy of sustainable development, we focus on development, i.e., to realize economic and social development under the prerequisite of utilizing resources in a sustainable manner and protecting the environment. In this particular respect, China has both accumulated experiences and learned lessons. Previously, we have followed a path similar to that of most other countries, i.e., harnessing pollution after pollution comes, and has paid huge prices for that. Such serious results have led many countries in the recent 10 years to pay increasing attention to the participation of auditing, especially government auditing, in environment protection. Environmental audit has become a brand new job in which many countries have expressed common interest and inputting enormous efforts.In 1995, the 15th INTOSAI selected environment audit as its theme. The Cairo Declaration pointed out that " due to the importance of issues related to the protection and improvement of environment, INTOSAI encourages SAIs to consider environment issues when exercising their audit duties and responsibilities" . What INTOSAI initiates and encourages are significant areas of concern for SAIs with instructive effect on audit conducted in various countries.Environmental audit in China has just started. In this article, the author begins with a discussion of the different institutions executing environmental audit, examines the contents of environmental audit, especially those executed by governmental institutions. In the meantime, the author puts forward a definition of environmental audit from his point of view.Based on the analysis of existing views of environmental audit from both home and abroad, this paper suggests that environmental audit is referred to "independent supervisory activities performed by audit institutions who will make a test and appraisal of the clients' procedures and policies with regard to the protection of environment, including the scientificity and rationality of the procedures (or policies), the authenticity, legality and effectiveness of their enforcement. This paper discusses the activities of different environmental audit performed by governmental institutions, internal auditing staff and public auditors to make a study of the contents of environmental audit. Due to the comprehensiveness of environmental audit, government should play the crucial role in those activities. So the author has made a detailed study of government environmental audit. The author holds that activities of government environmental audit should include compliance audit of environmental policies, audit of non-environmental policies, audit of environmental and non- environmental designs, audit of systems for environmental management, audit of fund for environmental protection, audit of investment in environmental protection projects and the construction of the projects, etc. This paper justifies the environmental audit activities exclusively performed by governmental institutions and suggests the different facets to perform environmental audit. Since there are little study of environmental audit performed by internal auditing staff and public auditors, the author merely provides some perspectives to the contents of them.