The Integration of Energy, Environment and Health Policies in China: A Review

The goal of sustainable development is far from being achieved in China. In this context, this paper aims to provide an overview of China’s energy, environment and health policies over the past 30 years and discuss whether the previous policies have fully integrated the energy, environment and health issues in its sustainable development agenda. From the overview, we observe that the energy policies accelerating energy industrial upgrading, stimulating development of new energy sources, deregulating energy pricing mechanism, promoting energy saving and seizing the opportunity of green growth are conducive to an improvement of environmental conditions and public health in China. However, the environmental policies are not effectively implemented and subsequently they could not succeed in reducing environmental risks on public health and putting pressure on enterprises to efficiently use energy. The health policies have not taken real actions to focus with any specificity on energy-induced or pollution-induced health problems.