A rare environmental success story: The Blue Map app and its 3.8 million Chinese users — Q&A with Ma Jun

Mǎ Jūn 马军 was born in Qingdao in 1968 and grew up in Beijing. A college degree in journalism and English led him to work for the South China Morning Post, where he first reported environmental stories that led to his book, China’s Water Crisis, in 1999. Ma founded the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), an NGO that gradually helped China’s lawmakers see the wisdom of transparency and public participation in the fight against China’s vast pollution challenge. Visiting New York, Ma spoke with Jonathan Landreth.

This is an abridged, edited transcript of their conversation.

You started IPE in 2006, right before the Beijing Summer Olympics, with just two colleagues. What was your mission then?

At that time, our pollution problem was very severe after decades of mass development. Hundreds of millions were pulled out of poverty, but the resulting pollution — from air pollution to water pollution to soil pollution — also exposed hundreds of millions to health risks. We were damaging our limited resources, like water, and causing biodiversity loss. At IPE, our mission was to bring this pollution under control, and to help safeguard the nation’s water and blue sky.

You and I both worked at the South China Morning Post at the same time. How did your work alongside Beijing Bureau Chief Jasper Becker shape your career?

My major was called international journalism, a combination of journalism and English. When I worked for the media in the 1990s, I got the chance to travel in different parts of the country. With Jasper, I traveled to the Three Gorges. I was struck by the environmental damage, particularly to our water resources. So I put it into a book, China’s Water Crisis, and published that in 1999.

People responded, saying that they understood there will be major risks with our water resources. They wanted to know how to solve the problem, and so I was pushed to extend my work and delve deeper into this issue. I switched from media and joined an environmental consulting firm and got myself familiar with all the environmental laws and policies, and then supply chain management and environmental auditing.

Then, in 2003, I was selected as a Yale World Fellow. At Yale, I did comparative research on environmental governance in the West and the East. Through all these years of further research, I came to believe that our environmental challenge was of such magnitude and was of such serious complexity that we could not resolve the problem without extensive public participation. The people must be informed.

Part of your stated mission was to increase public awareness about and participation in solving environmental problems. Since IPE’s founding in 2006 and now, have you accomplished that mission? How has the mission changed?

IPE has achieved at least part of our mission. When we were founded, China’s environmental pollution had reached its climax. In 2006, 28% of the nationally monitored sections of rivers and lakes reported worse than Category Five, which is the lowest water quality — it was good for no use at all and that’s all the water that some 300 million mostly rural residents had.

On the air side, it was getting increasingly more serious, until we reached a moment in 2011, when Beijing and the surrounding regions suffered from a very severe smog problem and exposed hundreds of millions to risks. Through all these years, we’ve managed to give people the chance to access this information.

When I did my research in the 1990s, it was very difficult to find much data on the water quality and emission sources, but today, we’re tracking hundreds of thousands of major emitters.

On our Blue Map app, we compile data from 20,000 monitoring stations reporting water quality in rivers, lakes, drinking water sources, and coastal seas.

On the air side, in 2008, we started an air pollution index we then co-developed as the Air Quality Transparency Index with Remin University. Through that index, we began to identify and highlight some of the key parameters that had not been previously included — PM2.5 and ozone, for example. We suggested that must be changed and that a daily average was not good enough. We needed hourly reporting. All this came true in 2013, when the government responded to the people’s voices, raised during the worst smog, and required a change to the law and required monitoring to be viewed hourly. In 2013, there were 74 cities that did this, then 190, and then, by 2015, all 338 major cities or municipalities in China started hourly air-quality reporting.

How many people are using your Blue Map app now and what do they use it for?

We have 3.8 million users of the Blue Map app. We built it in 2013 when the air quality started to be monitored and disclosed elevated levels of PM2.5. That’s when we launched a total transparency initiative, calling, along with 25 other NGOs, for full disclosure of the source of the PM2.5, such as major coal-powered iron, steel, cement, and chemical production companies. To our surprise, the Ministry of Environmental Protection, now known as the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE), made a bylaw to require major emitters to report every hour to the public.

How enforceable was that bylaw?

The bylaw went into effect in 2014 and was quite powerful because it required each province to build its own platform to carry out this monitoring and transparency. They had a national list, so each province, if it had factories on that list, needed to report on the new platform. At the beginning, not all of them did, but we co-developed a Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI) with the Natural Resources Defense Council and used it to assess the performance of 120 cities for more than 10 years. We integrated this new requirement into our PITI to assess the performance of each local emitter.

Were the provincial governments incentivized to develop good transparency, monitoring, and measurement by things like attracting foreign investment, or was it simply an answer to citizens’ outcry that their air and water were no good?

Water was never that powerful a motivator, but the air quality motivated the central government to make changes to laws and regulations. Bad air also motivated the central government to eventually build this into the performance review of local officials. When we started in 2006, many were suspicious of us, and we got some pressure coming not just from the polluting factories, but also, sometimes, from their official contacts. Local government officials gave us a hard time, but I still remember a turning point when we launched our Blue Map app, and one day, we got a request for a meeting with the head of the Shandong Province Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB).

I thought I would again be pressured to remove some of the information from our app, but his opening remark really surprised me. He said, “Look, I have 100 million people in our province, and we burn 400 million tons of coal. Now I’m ordered to clean up the PM2.5 and I don’t think I can deliver without the understanding and support of the people.” He said the Blue Map app could be a good platform because it’s based on science, on data, on monitoring. We were on the same page, so it was time to find a way to work together. We’d gotten support from the central government, from the MEE, because they didn’t want pollution to be out of control, but on the local government side, this was a first. The Shandong EPB head, Zhāng Bō 张波, was promoted to be the department chief in charge of water, then further promoted to be the chief engineer of the whole MEE.

Who are the unsung environmental heroes in China?

We have quite a few. One of them is former vice minister Pān Yuè 潘岳. He did a great job to follow the State Council’s guidance to pursue “administration by law.” Under his leadership, he created the Environmental Information Disclosure Measures. Although they were just in a provisional ministry bylaw, it served as a legal basis for our supervision and advocacy work. This was very important.

The other unsung hero is Mù Guǎngfēng 牟广丰, who used to be a vice department chief. When Mu was in charge of environmental impact assessment, he was very supportive of open information and public participation, trying to involve NGOs like IPE.

In the last decade, Communist Party General Secretary Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 has waffled on the importance of mitigating climate change. Has there been steady progress or has it been one step forward, two steps back?

During the past 10 years, we have seen China turning increasingly more toward environmental protection. In 2013, China launched the Clean Air Action Plan, followed by the clean water and clean soil action plans. It’s not just a bottom-up struggle. There have been a lot of top-down measures taken. There’s been a multi-stakeholder approach that helped to achieve something quite remarkable. In Beijing, the first year when we got our first air pollution rating, our annual average was 89.5 micrograms of PM2.5 and last year it dropped to 30. And, on the waterfront, it used to be that 28% of monitored water reported worse than Category Five, but now that has dropped to around 1%.

Our mission was partially accomplished over the last decade. Across the country, major cities’ average PM2.5 dropped by more than 50%. Having said that, in Beijing, we reduced our PM2.5 to 30 micrograms, but the World Health Organization has reduced the healthy status from 10 micrograms of PM2.5 to just five. Beijing is still six times higher than we should be, according to WHO, and we’re not stable. In the first quarter of 2023, we witnessed a rebound in pollution in many cities.

Is that pollution rebound tied to industrial output and economic growth targets?

Yes. Over the last three years, during the COVID-19 lockdown, there were more controls over some economic activities. Now, as restrictions relax and business is coming back and trying to pull off a big recovery, there’s a rebound in emissions. This, plus unfavorable weather conditions, spells trouble.

Fundamentally, some of China’s achievements were made based on end-of-the-pipe solutions, such as scrubbers that try to remove sulfur and nitrogen to make clean coal. From now on, though, we need something more fundamental: the transformation of our energy mix, the restructuring of our industry, and the transformation of our transport. We need a more powerful policy to make it happen.

When China made the commitment in September 2020 to have carbon diozide emissions peak before 2030, and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, it caught many by surprise, both outside and inside China. I thought it was exactly what we needed to motivate a much more fundamental transformation. We need to make a new start to try to achieve first a quality emissions peak, and then completely neutralize that more than 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide.

If we assume that China’s GDP growth is going to slow a little bit, how then does that desired transition to a different energy mix get paid for?

We believe that things need to happen in China from both ends, both top-down and bottom-up. Some of the actions taken may look purely top-down like the Clean Air Action Plan — a 10-point action plan initiated by the central government, which involves more than RMB 1.5 trillion — but it was people who made their voices heard, when they demanded reading of the air-quality data and then demanded solutions to solve the problem. So, there’s a kind of a combination of these two.

I believe that on the carbon side, we need the very powerful central government and policy initiatives, but in the meantime, we need people to gain awareness and to support tougher, stronger climate policy to give backing to the government on that policy and then also demand change at corporations. Sixty-eight percent of our emissions are generated during industrial production. As citizens and as consumers, we need to listen to and work with people inside corporations.

How much of China’s pollution is generated by foreign companies manufacturing in China for export?

Previous research showed that about a quarter of China’s emissions had something to do with export-oriented industries, but things are changing quickly. As China’s own consumption rises, its emissions are going up with society’s increased affluence. Having said that, I think quite a high proportion of the embedded carbon is still from the manufacture of goods exported from China.

We want to level the playing field. We want to be fair to everyone. When we launched our Blue Map database, we put any company violating the standards side by side. The first group that responded to us happened to be the multinationals. Name and shame. Name and shame. This works on them. It’s also fair because they made open commitments [to not pollute]. It’s right for them to honor their commitments.

Are multinationals not examples to their Chinese counterparts when they say, “Look, we may have been a bad actor, but we can acknowledge that and still survive as a company”?

Absolutely. They survive and now they excel in our pollution assessment, the IPE Corporate Information Transparency Index (CITI). We’re tracking more than 1,000 global and local brands and many of the multinationals excel and serve as models. At the beginning, it was not like that, particularly when it comes to supply chain pollution. We had a back-and-forth debate, especially with those companies that did not have to sign a direct contract with upstream suppliers, whose pollution they did not want to be held accountable for.

We started with the IT industry in 2010, then the fashion industry, then extended to more than 20 other industries. Through this process, we managed to help them leverage their purchasing power to impact a large number of suppliers. So far, more than 20,000 of the multinationals’ suppliers have come to IPE either to openly address the violations or use our platform to measure and disclose their emissions and carbon footprint. First, we motivate the multinationals and then, through them, we reach many private companies that are their suppliers.

The state-owned enterprises remain very tough to motivate. They’re further upstream, with raw materials. When we launched the Blue Map app, it was a game changer…When we could visualize which companies were not in compliance and see them turn into red dots on the Blue Map app, while those in compliance turned into green or blue dots.

Our Blue Map app users file tens of thousands of so-called micro reports against the red-dot polluters, particularly during very bad smoggy years. The people wanted to find a way to solve the problem, so our users did a lot of reporting via the app. What happened in Shandong was partially because of that. We reached an agreement that they would respond to whatever pollution reporting was made by people based on the monitoring data. We’re talking about thousands upon thousands of reports. That was not easy work.

[Shandong EPB] Director Zhang set up an official provincial EPB Weibo account and required each of the province’s 17 municipalities to set up their own accounts and, under that, accounts for more than 100 counties and districts. So whoever’s jurisdiction the red dot appeared in [on the Blue Map app] needed to follow up, otherwise, they would be tagged by their superior. It was amazing. Through this process, hundreds of the emitters — more than half of them state-owned enterprises, and some of them directly controlled by the central government, with higher administrative status than the local EPB — for the first time responded to people’s reporting. It changed the dynamic. Before, local mayors often tried to give protection to key companies, so the EPB wasn’t able to do much, even if they had the online monitoring data. That data could not be used for penalizing companies.

After a whole round of this micro-reporting, there were a lot fewer blatant violations. Some companies used to violate the standards by 10 times, every hour, for hours and hours, and they were not very red [on the Blue Map app]. It worked to give the disclosure platform and accountability and responsibility to the provinces. When you try to centralize that into a super big platform, it’s very hard.

Did provincial governors and EPBs compete with one another to develop a better reporting platform?

Some of them. Shandong is a very good example. Zhejiang isn’t bad, and Beijing, Shanghai — I think they are trying to develop better reporting. The most interesting part was some of the city EPBs redesigning their websites in response to our pollution index, which allowed them to advertise how comprehensive and timely their pollution disclosures were, the integrity of the data, and their user-friendliness.

The reason why the Blue Map app has so many users is that there’s so much data and it’s very hard to expect local governments to make it user-friendly. It’s easier for IPE as an organization. It does the monitoring and discloses on whatever corners of its website, then we bring the data together to help people to understand it. Ordinary citizens are not able to understand the standards of sulfur dioxide or particulates or carbon or nitrogen. The pure data doesn’t make sense to them. We help them visualize it.

If a particular province is seen to be transparent about pollution data and handling the situation, does that entice new business?

I haven’t fully studied that. China’s coast attracted a lot of multinationals seeking to expand their global supply chain. All this monitoring and reporting and transparency has actually helped to lower the cost for supply chain environmental management. Before we launched this program, companies needed to send in consultants to do auditing all the time. But now they can tap into all this monitoring data. We used to have quite a serious trust issue with data on air quality and water quality. But then the government found that whenever you require real-time disclosure, it helps to solve the problem to some extent.

One example: Before China required local governments to commit to real-time disclosure of all air-quality data, 80% met with the standards. But after [real-time disclosure was required], nearly 80% failed.

Supervision from the people is very important. We have NGO partners working with us. We provide them with our big data platform, with the capacity to understand the emissions of more than 10,000 major companies, which they can now supervise. Before, that number was maybe just a dozen companies at the most. One NGO called Green Jiangnan, an amazing partner, developed a real capability to use drones to do all this supervision. Over the last several years, they have traveled some 50,000 kilometers, flying their drones everywhere. Data and actual imagery is a very good combination.

How does IPE help consumers make green choices?

We have a green supply chain index that we use to assess more than 600 major global and local brands. If people choose, they can understand which supplier has better supply chain performance. Also, we have a tool inside the Blue Map app that allows the user to take a picture of an item and learn its embedded carbon. What I’m trying to do next is challenge major brands to measure and disclose carbon for every item they sell.

We are developing a product carbon footprint disclosure platform and catalog. Eventually, AI technology will be able to recognize the exact brand of a product, report its carbon, and stream the data into our platform so user-consumers can then pull down an accurate report before they make a purchase.

How far off is that capability?

We’re at the beginning, but we can already see that companies like Apple and Lenovo have disclosed the carbon footprint of, in Lenovo’s case, more than 1,000 of their products already. People can check on our website easily by just typing in “Lenovo.”

Is it the only company that has done that?

It’s not unique, more tens of thousands of products now have this data, but many of them are not disclosed. We try to convince the companies to disclose, but they keep the data to themselves.

What advantage do they gain from having that knowledge without sharing it?

They probably have been motivated by either investors or stakeholders reluctant to disclose, especially when it’s not a norm. The reason we are building that platform is to try to make it a norm.

We are just now launching our Zero Carbon Supply Chain Initiative, for which we’re seeking co-sponsors — corporations, NGOs, and financial institutions. We hope that we can all realize that geopolitical tension has risen to such an extent that it’s very hard to expect all these countries to enhance their Nationally Determined Commitments to reduce emissions through the Conference of Parties, or COP, process established by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. We want to show the corporations that they must do more to meet these NDCs.

It’s very hard to further enhance that so-called “climate ambition” nationally because they all have problems, so the corporations need to do more if we don’t want to miss the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, meaning greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025.

From the UNFCCC meetings in Paris (2016) to Glasgow (2021) to Sharm El Sheikh (2022), hundreds of the largest brands and financial institutions made their commitments, but much of their footprint is actually in their supply chain, and much of that is in the world’s factory in China. Through our research analysis, many of them haven’t done much at all in China.

Is that because they cannot force local Chinese manufacturers to keep up?

They haven’t even reached that level. Most of them simply didn’t realize when they signed their NDCs that their commitment would have to be extended to their operations in China and to other manufacturing centers in the Global South. We need to help them consolidate their NDCs and find a way to hold them accountable, and, in the meantime, also create solutions for them because, quite sincerely, they simply don’t know how to deal with the supply chain in China.

I was very surprised by what happened in East Palestine, Ohio, with that toxic chemical spill from a derailed train in the middle of America. We learned so much from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with its vast capacity and experience, and all kinds of management around event disclosure, and transparency. What we saw in this case was not a very [good] performance that actually undermined the credibility of the EPA.

Was the chemical spill in Ohio a sign of falling out of practice because the United States doesn’t have the large-scale industry it once did?

Exactly. Even the best, the EPA, which used to have the best capacity to handle pollution crises, may still not perform if we don’t keep vigilant. Now we need to understand the layers upon layers of complicated supply chains. In China, over all these years, we managed to find some solutions to address the supply chain — first local pollution but now climate change mitigation. That’s why we decided to come up with the Zero Carbon Supply Chain initiative. On my first trip back to the U.S. in at least three years, I’ve heard concerns about emissions impact from China. There are opportunities for those who are concerned about what’s happening in China to really do something, because day-in-day-out, everyone’s consumption has embedded carbon.

An April 2023 Pew Research Center study shows that American distrust of China is on the rise again. During your visit to the U.S. this time, what was the most common misperception of China among the Americans you spoke with?

I think one of the misperceptions is that China doesn’t pay attention to the environmental climate impact, or climate problems, and hasn’t really done much to try to address them. That’s not quite right. Over the past 10 years, so much effort has been made. Each time I show my American friends the Blue Map app, they feel reassured that good things are happening in China. We’re talking about tens of thousands of monitoring stations and millions of companies being dotted on the digital map and color-coded based on their environmental performance. We’re talking about the major efforts to try to green the supply chain there and working together with some of the largest brands from America. And also, on the finance side, we’ve helped major banks to do due diligence on more than a million companies that want to borrow money, because we have their environmental performance records.

Does IPE now also have subscribers who pay for bespoke research?

Because we started as an independent watchdog, I don’t want to create a moral hazard by doing the supervision of the corporations but then charge them for the research. We haven’t done that. On the finance side, it’s a different story. We haven’t done supervision of the banks and so now they pay for our service.

Is that servicing of the banks done by IPE or by a different entity?

We incubate a for-profit research firm called InsBlue. Some of the banks sign a contract directly with IPE, but if the money comes into our organization, we cannot divide the spoils, we can only keep the money within our organization. No one profits. Others sign directly with InsBlue, also based in Beijing, started roughly two years ago. Its clients are primarily the banks and some brands, because they provide value-added service, developing their own applications to serve their clients. IPE provided InsBlue with a long-term contract for the data and the methodology. I hope one day it will make big money and it will give us some and make our work more sustainable.

How are you supporting IPE now? Was that part of the reason for your trip to the U.S.?

I was invited to attend and to speak at the Columbia Global Energy Summit. I did meet with a group of funders, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), which started us out very early on with funding support. Then a whole group of American foundations, like the Skoll Foundation, gave us major awards in 2015 and 2016. Put together, it was more than $1 million. For our organization, that was big support.

Which Chinese foundations have backed IPE?

We got early support from the Society of Entrepreneurs and Ecology — in Chinese, it calls itself Alashan. It gave us funding support of RMB 20 million over five years, which gave us the assurance that we could expand. Then, later, we also got support from the Alibaba Foundation and the Vanke Foundation.

What was your budget when you started and what is it now?

For the first nine months, I just put my own money into IPE and felt very nervous. Then I got RBF to give me support. So very, very little at the beginning. It took me more than 10 years before my salary finally reached the level it was when I left the SCMP. It was not easy with so much inflation going on. In 2022, our annual budget was roughly 19 million yuan [$2.75 million]. This year, we may have to reduce that a bit because COVID has had such a big impact and the local foundations, our biggest funders, have had some difficulties.

Among my earliest childhood memories are of Los Angeles smog in the 1970s. I grew up waiting in gas lines in my parents’ car. It took 40 years for L.A. to turn the corner, from the 1940s to the 1980s. Like me, do you feel Beijing and L.A. are similar, as big, flat cities encircled by mountains that trap all the bad, dry air?

Compared with Los Angeles, Beijing managed to shorten the process to reduce the air pollution and bring it under control. In many other cities, in other parts of the world, it took longer. Los Angeles is a classic case, where it took longer to reduce. In 2012, during Beijing’s “Airpocalypse,” many people felt that the air problem in Beijing was going to take decades to solve, and some of my friends even moved away from Beijing to other countries.

But then we proved that we can actually do it faster. In 10 years, there’s a big difference. So that’s a very important lesson that I don’t want us to miss. We Chinese, along with the whole world, are anxiously watching global emissions not drop, but actually rebound and go up over the past two years. So we’re on track to miss the 1.5°C target. I keep thinking that if we manage to cut our emissions roughly in half, maybe the world can copy the success and may still be able to achieve something. We need to cut 45% within this decade.

When you wake up in Beijing every morning, what pollution do you encounter?

Along with many of our Blue Map app users, my habit is to check the air-quality forecast up to five days ahead and, depending on that, decide what time I should arrange my exercise and take my eight-year-old daughter outside. I’m so happy to have more blue sky days, otherwise, I would be so anxious. It’s much better than 10 years ago. At that time, when we got the first readings from monitoring PM2.5, the monthly average was around 150 micrograms, at a time when the clean air standard from the World Health Organization was 10 micrograms.

In 2011, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing was posting the PM2.5 reading on its website daily and it got picked up by some Weibo celebrities. At that time, China didn’t have any official monitoring of PM2.5, let alone disclosure. The readings we did have, released monthly, were the daily averages of PM10, which obviously did not match with data the U.S. Embassy was putting out.

Initially, people distrusted the government data, but starting in 2013, gradually people began to trust, because they could see that the two readings in the adjacent monitoring sessions were similar. Of course, the Air Quality Index was still different because they benchmarked against different standards. It demonstrated that if you want people to trust, you go transparent. It’s still the norm now at the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, which is the standard bearer among all the agencies on transparency.

How large a ministry is it and who heads it now?

The MEE is not that large. The head of the ministry is Huáng Rùnqiū 黄润秋. The previous ministers all got promoted, so that sends a good signal. Minister Chén Jíníng 陈吉宁 first became the mayor of Beijing and now the Party secretary of Shanghai.

What’s currently the most pressing challenge?

We never underestimate the challenge. It’s not easy. Before, we had global solidarity and international pressure on China to move on the environment on the climate side, but now, the whole world is under such tension, particularly this war in Europe, and the focus of most of the major economies in the world has shifted, making them prioritize energy security to a much-higher level. There’s not as much solidarity and pressure, so we must find our own motivation to carry on, otherwise, it’s very easy for those who have a more pro-development bent to argue that we need to make our priorities economic recovery and energy security. We see this not just in China. In other parts of the world, there are increasing voices like that.

How exportable is the Blue Map app to the rest of the Global South?

For too long, we focused on solving our own problems, cleaning China’s water and air and soil and coastal seas. Suddenly, we realized that when people from other parts of the world approach us — no longer just friends from the West — they often are from the Global South. And they’re not just NGOs, but sometimes even government agencies, and financial institutions — from Mongolia to Vietnam to India. They’ve approached us to say that they’re interested not just in the lessons we’ve learned, but also in our practical solutions to all the pollution they’re starting to experience.

It seems like an interesting rhyme. Just as big Western brands often don’t recognize that they have to work with China to go green, Chinese companies moving into Africa and Latin America need to do the same thing, do they not?

Right. They have not much experience with that. It’s not just about the environment by itself, but also about public engagement. Chinese companies have not been much tested within China. They suffer from that lack of experience and knowledge about the local situation overseas. Alongside them, the banks and financial institutions that supported Chinese companies operating overseas also suffer sometimes very big losses due to that ignorance. There’s a growing interest in trying to manage this process and to enhance the capacity to work responsibly around the world.

Now, when IPE is approached by stakeholders from other parts of the world, I realize that China has a growing global footprint, and that we need to manage that, and we had better do it with partners in other parts of the world. IPE has no global outreach capacity so far, but if we can work with local partners and transfer some knowhow, that would be helpful. We’ve been approached by an NGO in Africa that wants to do a pan-Africa Blue Map–style app. We would be very happy to do that, not just providing the technology but also helping to compile information about China’s impact in Africa and transfer that data back to China so that the stakeholders will pay attention, including the regulators and the banks and the NGO partners. Over the long run, it can only be very helpful.

What’s the state of China’s environmental law?

The law has also been changed during the last decade. There’s been big change and IPE has been involved at every stage. China published the first Environmental Protection Law in 1979. It wasn’t amended for a long time, until 2011–12. We at IPE got involved in that process. We were summoned by our legislators in the National People’s Congress. I still remember their questions. It took four years for an amended version of the Environmental Protection Law to be published in 2015. The best part of that was a special chapter, chapter five. This was the first-ever legislation in Chinese history to have a special chapter titled “Transparency and Public Participation.” It serves today as a much-stronger legal basis than Minister Pan Yue’s provisional bylaw. Within the amended Environmental Protection Law, the NPC adopted some American models, one of them being a daily penalty fine. A company can be penalized every day if you are in violation of pollution standards.

Has that panned out? Have companies been fined and paid up?

Some of them have paid tens of millions of dollars because of that fine, which has a strong connection with our online monitoring, without which one cannot have the strong basis to penalize polluters every day. Citizens must always be vigilant. We must keep an eye on industry. Always.