US-China Partnership for Environmental Law

Director's Message

As Vermont Law School embarks on the fourth year of its partnership with USAID, our program has steadily grown and evolved. Since 2007, we have added several new implementing partner organizations, both in the US and in China: the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, and the Training Center of the National Development and Reform Commission of China in Beijing. And we continue to work with many other organizations through more informal arrangements. Together with our partners, we have trained over one thousand individuals in environmental and energy law. We have also helped nurture and expand the environmental law program at Sun Yat-sen University Law School. Most recently, with a one-time, one-year $350,000 grant from the State Department's Educational and Cultural Affairs Office, we initiated an exchange program for a group of young environmental professionals focusing on environmental justice and climate change issues. With a three-year extension and increased funding for our core program funding from USAID, we have also expanded our staff.

These developments represent exciting opportunities for us to continue and expand the Partnership's work in building China's capacity of individuals and institutions to solve environmental and energy problems. Over the past several years, we have found an enormous amount of dedication by our partners and many others to improving environmental quality and justice. Their efforts are in many instances pioneering and commendable. As environmental challenges such as climate change grow in urgency and the role of China in solving these problems becomes more important, we plan to engage individuals and institutions to become active. Our priorities remain on environmental and energy law training with the objective of speeding up the emergence of an environmental bar, capacity-building of various key institutions, and the creation of networks. Our substantive focus areas will be on environmental governance, climate change, energy, and environmental due diligence issues such as environmental impact assessment.

Finally, reflecting the expanded scope and evolution of our mission, effective fall 2009, we will have a new name: The US-China Partnership for Environmental Law. To learn more about these and other exciting changes, please visit our other program web pages on this site.

Tseming Yang
Professor of Law
Program Director/Chief of Party
US-China Partnership for Environmental Law