The Research On Environmental Auditing By Government In The Perspective Of Ecological Civilization Construction

With the fast development of the economy and the population growth, the environment deterioration becomes a severe problem in China. The environment of people’s work and life are getting worse and various environmental problems emerge in an endless stream, such as extreme climate change, freshwater pollution and marine pollution, decreasing forest coverage rate, desertification, acid rain, haze and fog.The environmental problem has become a hot topic in the national governance of China and it has been gradually getting more attention from government departments at all levels. One of the national governance objectives proposed by the newly elected government is "to protect ecological environment and to develop ecological civilization of socialism". The National Auditing Department, as part of the government organization, has independent supervision and evaluation duty, which is authoritative and compulsory. It plays a positive role in protecting and managing the environment and promoting the awareness of environmental protection.Environmental auditing originates from Western developed countries in the1960s. The research of environmental auditing started early in these developed countries which covered a wide range of topics. Although the research of environmental auditing in China started later, the practice and research of environmental auditing has been growing rapidly since the1990s when the environmental deterioration became severe and the governmental auditing department paid greater attention on the environmental problems.This article discusses government environmental auditing from the perspective of ecological civilization construction. Through summarizing the historical development and the current status of our government environment auditing, analyzing current issues and the causes, making reference with overseas experiences and taking into account the requirement of the ecological civilization construction, we propose certain measures and solutions to solve the problems and improve government environmental auditing.The first part of the article introduces background and importance of our research and provides explanation on the basic concepts of ecology, ecological civilization, ecological civilization construction, environmental auditing and government environmental auditing. We also elaborate the relevance between the ecological civilization construction and the government environmental auditing and summarize domestic and foreign research results on environmental auditing. We then present our research method and the innovation of this paper.Part Two is a review of historical development, current status and the achievements of government environmental auditing in China. According to the new requirements of ecological civilization construction, we consider measures to improve the practice of government environmental auditing in China.Part Three analyzes the current problems existing in government environmental auditing in China and the causes of these problems.Part Four introduces the status of government environmental auditing in overseas countries, such as US, Holland, Germany, Canada, etc. We summarized their advanced experiences and extract points that might be inspiring to the improvement of government environmental auditing in China.In Part Five, with integration of contents in previous sections and in the perspective of the ecological civilization construction, we propose measures and solutions to improve the government environmental auditing in the following areas: strengthen the institutional infrastructure of environmental auditing, expanding the coverage and methods of environmental auditing, elevate the ability of environmental auditing, and strengthen the enforcement of environmental auditing results. We hope these measures could help to solve the problems and to improve the government environmental auditing in China.