Abstract:

China is experiencing a significant development of its road transport network，and this is causing ecological disruption and environmental issues.As for limitations of project environmental impact assessment，the enactment and implementation of 2003 EIA Law requires the assessment of environmental effects of transport plans and various provisions have been made to facilitate the implementation of transport strategic environmental assessment (SEA) and to integrate environmental considerations into transport decisionmaking process.However，most existing researches were concerning with the context and framework of transport SEA，so methods for evaluating the impacts of road network that links urban areas are still on the way.Based on the case study from Hubei Province funded by the World Bank，the key issues and methodologies of road network plant SEA were demonstrated in this paper，including the plan analysis，baseline assessment，key issues identification，forecast，institutional analysis and public participation.Finally some discussions on the transport planning tiering and the appropriate linkage were provided to improve the implement of the transport SEA in China