Environmental regulation for new pollutant risk governance
New pollutants have three major characteristics:'high biotoxicity,''environmental persistence,'and'bioaccumulation,'and they tend to cause'cumulative environmental health risks,''diffuse ecological environmental risks,'and'sudden environmental and social risks.'In the face of these compounded risks and challenges,traditional environmental regulation is confronted with multiple dilemmas:First,the current environmental regulatory system may fail to address the proactive preventive demands of new pollutants on environmental health risks.Second,conventional environmental regulatory frameworks struggle to cope with the collaborative gover-nance requirements of new pollutant-induced environmental risks.Third,the traditional environmental regulatory model tends to be in-adequate in meeting the urgent response and control demands of new pollutant-induced social risks.To cope with the challenge of these overlapping risks,this study proposes the following environmental management optimization strategies that meet the requirements of new pollutant control in response to the difficulties in traditional ecological environmental management:updating the existing ecological environmental management system to address the health risks posed by new pollutants,filling the gaps in ecological environmental man-agement by focusing on the ecological environmental risks of new pollutants,and resolving the failure of ecological environmental man-agement in response to the social risks posed by new pollutants.In the face of the risks posed by new pollutant control,the tasks of eco-logical environmental management transformation should include the following three aspects:First,establishing the goal of'active pre-vention'of risks to update the ecological environmental management system;second,strengthening the ecological environmental man-agement chain with a comprehensive and dynamic risk coordination and control approach;and third,improving the ecological environ-mental management model by constructing an elastic governance mechanism for environmental and social risks.According to the above ideas,the optimization of environmental management for new pollutant risk control should also involve the need to explore institutional improvements in terms of legislative goals,regulatory scope,and normative systems.The specific regulatory content should include es-tablishing the principle of'active prevention'of risks in general environmental laws and its applicable rules,adopting a typology of rules for comprehensive risk coordination and control of new pollutant risks based on the concept of'lifecycle governance,'and con-structing an elastic governance system for environmental and social risks posed by new pollutants.
risk preventionnew pollutantsecological environment governancerisk society