What do a dead man, a wanted criminal and several mysterious out-of-towners have in common? They all supposedly contributed to an environmental assessment for a garbage incineration plant - a particularly controversial industry given the recent severe smog that has blanketed northern China.

Dead men may generally tell no lies, but that doesn't seem to be the case in Panguanying village, Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province. Villagers were outraged when the public submissions regarding a garbage incineration factory were blatantly faked, and even included the name of a dead man.

Now they're rallying support to take on the plant, and the institution that was responsible for approving it.

The environmental assessment for the factory, which was a joint project between the Zhejiang Weiming company and the city's government, included the names of multiple villagers who had already left the town. To make matters worse, the China Academy of Meteorological Sciences (CAMS) was implicated in the forgery.

 "Who can trust that the factory will control their pollutants when they have already added fake materials to the environmental assessment?" said Pan Zuofu, a 44-year-old villager, adding that although the assessment involved sending out 100 questionnaires with villagers' names on them, they hadn't heard anything about it at the time.

The villagers aren't alone in their fight, with environmental NGOs now joining the fray. On Wednesday, 11 NGOs together with dozens of concerned citizens jointly petitioned the Ministry of Environmental Protection to cancel the CAMS qualification to oversee environmental assessments.

The call to cancel the qualification is still collecting signatures on the official website of Nature University, one of the NGOs involved in the petition.

This is the second time NGOs have initiated a joint protest demanding the ministry punish CAMS for unethical assessments of incineration plants.

Hazy transparency

One of the signees, Mao Da, the co-founder of a Beijing-based independent environmental think tank, told the Global Times that the assessment by the CAMS on the Qinhuangdao project was in fact the first time he had seen the full version of an environmental assessment.

"Most of the time, when we demanded local environmental protection bureaus disclose assessments, they either refused or only gave partial reports to us," Mao added.

In the petition documents the NGOs handed over to the ministry, they pointed out that the ninth chapter of the assessment said 99 percent of the villagers supported the construction of a garbage incinerator, but it turned out that 15 of the respondents were not from the village, one had already died, and one had fled the village due to criminal charges.

When requesting a response from the ministry, Mao was told that if the assessment was approved by the ministry, a response would be offered, but if it was not approved, petitioners would have to return to provincial environmental protection bureaus.

Hu Ya, a staff member of the press center at the China Meteorological Administration, which administers CAMS, said they had seen information related to the petition online. However, they gave no reply to Global Times enquiries as of press time.

A lack of transparency was also one of the key factors behind a mass demonstration last year in Shifang, Sichuan Province, over a heavy metal refinery project.

The project, with a total investment of 6.7 billion yuan ($1.05 billion) was expected to refine 40,000 tons of molybdenum and 400,000 tons of copper each year, according to the ministry's website.

Though the local government promised that the project's environmental assessment was approved by the ministry after thousands of residents took to the streets to protest against the project's construction, the public still had difficulty trusting officials because they did not fully participate in the decision-making process.

"The construction of these projects strongly affects the public, but most of the time they are isolated from the process of understanding and participating in the decision-making process. This is terrible because the public is disadvantaged, compared to governments and companies," Feng Yongfeng, a senior researcher at Nature University, told the Global Times.

Cracking down?

In June 2011, five NGOs petitioned the ministry to cancel the CAMS' grade-A qualification to draft environmental assessments.

Other than forging public participation questionnaires in the Qinhuangdao project, the NGOs said they strongly suspected that it had also forged questionnaires relating to two garbage incinerators in Beijing.

Officially, the ministry lowered the CAMS' qualification to assess some regional projects to grade-B in December last year, stating that the formulation of the report had not involved sufficient numbers of qualified professionals.

Seven other institutions received the same punishment due to a lack of qualified assessors.

In a ministry campaign that took place from June to October last year, about 88 institutions conducting environmental assessments were punished and ordered to overhaul their methodology. Among them, two were disqualified from conducting these kinds of assessments entirely.

However, CAMS was still categorized as grade-A on the ministry's website as of Thursday.

In Feng's eyes, many assessments have all kinds of problems and the top problem is that the efforts put into the assessments are far from sufficient.

Assessors require more than a couple of months to fully investigate the real situation relating to projects with the potential to cause pollution, but some assessments are almost done in one afternoon, Feng said.

"In an assessment of a power generating project in Guanghan, Sichuan Province, I found out that the people in charge of assessing the project had never been to the site. The descriptions of the local species were purely from their imagination and plagiarism," Feng said.

On the blacklist issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, some institutions were found to have hidden information, offered fake materials and lacked proper management, which caused omissions in the assessments they handed over to the ministry.

Mao said that stakeholders are not fully aware of the importance of environmental assessments and with current lack of transparency, NGOs are very concerned by these kinds of reports.

"Those assessments not only detail the current situation of a project, but also offer an important index to monitor future emissions of pollutants. If the assessment is not accurate, how can we be sure that pollutants can be controlled at a safe level?" Mao asked.