The Blue Map
After founding the IPE in 2006, Ma Jun’s first goal was to make official environmental information easier for the public to access and use. To achieve this, through the IPE, he developed the IPE Pollution Database in 2007, an online database that centralised official government records of corporate environmental violations into a single publicly accessible resource. In 2014, IPE expanded the initiative with the Blue Map, an interactive website and mobile application that integrated the Pollution Database with real-time information on air quality, water quality, industrial emissions, and pollution sources across China. In 2020, the Blue Map was further expanded through the Blue Map for Zero Carbon, which added corporate greenhouse gas emissions, carbon footprints, and climate-related disclosures to the existing platform.
The IPE Pollution Database and the Blue Map are different stages of the same environmental transparency initiative. Their development reflected changes in China’s environmental information disclosure system. When little official data was publicly available, IPE focused on collecting and centralizing fragmented government records. Later, as regulations required increasing numbers of companies to disclose environmental and emissions data and new datasets became available, the IPE developed Blue Map to integrate all this information into a single interactive platform.
Prior to the Measures on Open Environmental Information, which came into force on 1 May 2008, pollution records, environmental monitoring reports, enforcement notices, and environmental violation records were dispersed across numerous local Ecology and Environment Bureau (EEB) websites and government announcements. As a result, anyone trying to understand a company’s environmental history had to search across dozens of different sources, making the information difficult to find, compare, and use.
To address this problem, Ma collected and consolidated these records into a single publicly accessible database. The outcome was the IPE Pollution Database, launched in 2007, which at the time consisted of approximately 2,000 pollution violations from local authorities across China. It became the country’s first nationwide public database of corporate environmental violations. As the Chinese government gradually expanded environmental information disclosure, the database also grew. By 2024, it contained more than 2.9 million environmental enforcement records, making it the largest public environmental database in China.
China’s environmental information disclosure framework expanded rapidly after 2013 with the central government’s introduction of the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan, followed by the revised Environmental Protection Law in 2014. These measures established new requirements for major polluters to disclose emissions data in real time. As increasing amounts of information became available, Ma Jun adapted his approach from simply centralizing government records to integrating multiple datasets into a single platform that made them easier to access, interpret, and use. To support this evolving disclosure system, the IPE created the Blue Map website and mobile application in 2014.
Building on the existing IPE Pollution Database, the Blue Map combined historic pollution violation records with the increasing volume of real-time environmental information that became public. This included data on air quality, water quality, industrial emissions, and pollution source monitoring. Citizens can use the platform to identify nearby polluting factories, monitor local environmental conditions, and report suspected environmental violations directly through the application. These reports are forwarded to the relevant EEB for investigation. The platform then lets users track the outcome of reported cases.
In 2020, the IPE expanded Blue Map through the Blue Map for Zero Carbon, which introduced data on corporate greenhouse gas emissions, carbon footprints, energy use, and other climate-related information. This reflected China’s growing commitment to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. As China strengthened its climate commitment, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) launched the Reform Plan for the Legal Environmental Information Disclosure System in 2021, which required companies to disclose more climate-related information. This made new datasets publicly available, which Blue Map for Zero Carbon incorporated into the platform. In addition, through the Blue Map for Zero Carbon, the IPE also provides companies with digital tools to measure and report their greenhouse gas emissions. This expanded IPE’s transparency model from pollution monitoring alone to also include corporate climate data.
Overall, the IPE Pollution Database, Blue Map, and Blue Map for Zero Carbon represent three stages of the same environmental transparency initiative. As China’s environmental disclosure system expanded, Ma Jun adapted his approach to make use of the increasing amount of information. He first brought together scattered government records of corporate environmental violations through the IPE Pollution Database. As more types of environmental information became available, he developed Blue Map to combine these datasets with real-time environmental monitoring in a single platform. Finally, as companies began disclosing climate-related information, he expanded the platform again through Blue Map for Zero Carbon.
Green Supply Chain Initiative
Ma Jun’s second major environmental initiative was the Green Supply Chain Initiative (GSCI), a voluntary program launched in 2007, with the goal to improve the environmental performance of Chinese manufacturers. The initiative invites multinational companies to participate by working with the IPE to identify and address environmental violations within their Chinese supply chains. The GSCI uses the commercial and reputational influence of multinational corporations to encourage their suppliers to improve environmental performance.
The GSCI works by linking official environmental violations committed by Chinese suppliers to the multinational companies that purchase from them. Participating companies voluntarily provide the IPE with their supplier lists, which are matched against official environmental records in the Blue Map and, before 2014, the IPE Pollution Database. When suppliers are found to have committed environmental violations, such as discharging wastewater without a permit, exceeding air or water pollution limits, or breaching emissions standards, the IPE notifies the purchasing companies. These companies are then expected to work with their suppliers to implement corrective measures. Once compliance has been demonstrated, the IPE reviews the evidence and updates the supplier’s environmental record. Since the launch of Blue Map for Zero Carbon in 2020, the IPE also gives GSCI participants data on the greenhouse gas emissions of their suppliers.
The Green Supply Chain Initiative was formally launched in 2007 as the Green Choice Alliance (GCA), coordinated by IPE and initially composed of 20 environmental NGOs from China. The Alliance aimed to encourage multinational corporations to incorporate publicly available environmental information into their supplier selection and management processes. The project slowly turned into the Green Supply Chain Initiative as more multinational companies joined the project.
The GSCI emerged from Ma Jun’s earlier experiences as both a journalist and an environmental consultant. In 2004, prior to his start at IPE, he served as an environmental consultant with Sinosphere Corporation, a China-based environmental consulting company, engaging in one of China’s first corporate social responsibility efforts centered on supply-chain management. In this work he noticed that suppliers tended to shrug at environmental fines but turned to action when they faced the possibility of losing contracts with large international companies. These experiences convinced him that commercial incentives and reputational pressure could, in some cases, drive faster environmental improvements than government enforcement alone.
This insight became the foundation of the GSCI, as the initiative is built on two ideas:
- Multinational corporations are highly sensitive to reputational pressure from consumers, investors, and NGOs.
- Suppliers are more likely to address environmental violations when they risk losing business from these multinational companies than when they face regulatory fines alone.
Even though participation is voluntary, the GSCI relies on these incentives to encourage multinationals to join by providing them with a tool to identify environmental problems within their Chinese supply chains. The program does not address factory pollution directly. Instead, it links polluting factories to the global brands that buy from them, encouraging these companies to monitor their suppliers and improve their environmental performance.
The scale of the initiative expanded significantly over time. By 2024, at least 780 companies across over 20 industries were participating, using IPE’s environmental data to identify and address environmental risks within their supply chains. Multinational companies like Apple, Walmart, Nike, Adidas and H&M are among the participants.
The Green Supply Chain Initiative targets all three environmental challenges discussed in this report. Water pollution, air pollution, and biodiversity loss are frequently linked to industrial production, particularly in sectors such as textiles, electronics, chemicals, and manufacturing. Ma Jun recognised that many local governments prioritised economic growth over environmental protection, resulting in weak enforcement of pollution laws for local factories. The initiative, therefore, created an alternative mechanism for influencing polluters by introducing market-based consequences for environmental violations.
Corporate Information Transparency Index (CITI) and Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI)
Ma Jun’s third big environmental solution was the creation of the Corporate Information Transparency Index (CITI) in 2014 and the Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI) in 2008. While the Blue Map opened up information to the public, and the Green Supply Chain Initiative pushed multinational companies to leverage that information, CITI and PITI launched a standardised framework for ranking environmental practices of companies and Chinese cities, respectively.
CITI builds directly on the Green Supply Chain Initiative. While the GSCI encourages multinational corporations to use their purchasing power to improve the environmental performance of their Chinese suppliers, CITI measures how effectively those multinationals have carried out this commitment in practice. It publicly ranks domestic and international brands based on how effectively they identify supplier violations, engage with suppliers, and improve environmental performance across their supply chains. PITI performs a similar role for local governments, assessing how openly they disclose environmental information. Together, the CITI and PITI transform transparency into a measurable form of environmental governance by converting both corporate and local government performance into comparable public rankings.
PITI was developed jointly by the IPE and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a US-based international environmental NGO, to measure the transparency of environmental information from China’s local governments. The index tracks how open and transparent cities are when disclosing pollution data. Cities are scored on common metrics: pollution monitoring data, emissions information, environmental law enforcement records, and the timeliness, completeness, and accuracy of what they disclose. Each city receives a score, published annually. This allows local governments to compare their performance and creates an incentive to improve transparency.
PITI is a measure of how transparent local governments are, while CITI uses a similar evaluation system to measure transparency amongst domestic and international brands. Rather than engaging directly with suppliers, CITI evaluates each company’s own environmental management, disclosure practices, and oversight of its supply chain, then publishes the results as a public ranking. The assessment is based on information from the Blue Map, official government environmental records, companies’ environmental disclosures, documented pollution violations, pollution violation responses, supplier management, environmental compliance, and corrective actions. Because these rankings are based on standardised criteria, they let regulators, investors, consumers and NGOs directly compare companies’ environmental performance against one another.
PITI and CITI form an integrated environmental accountability system. As environmental governance researcher Kate Logan has argued, the two indices work together: PITI pushes governments to disclose more, and that disclosure feeds better data into CITI’s corporate ratings, which in turn strengthens corporate environmental governance. In theory, this creates a cycle where transparency keeps improving on both sides, government and corporate, driven by public demand for trustworthy environmental information.
Together, the Blue Map, GSCI, CITI and PITI form a complementary transparency framework. The Blue Map provides the informational foundation by collecting and centralizing official government environmental data and making it publicly accessible. Building on this, the GSCI uses that data to identify suppliers with environmental violations and encourages multinational corporations to work with those suppliers to improve compliance. The CITI then evaluates how effectively those brands have responded to supplier issues and managed the environmental performance of their supply chains. Finally, the PITI assesses how transparently local governments are disclosing environmental information in the first place—that underpins the entire system. Through this layered structure, Ma Jun created a framework in which official environmental data is first made accessible, then used to drive corporate behavior change, and finally used to evaluate both government and corporate performance.
IE x RAIA Summer Research Programme
This article is an excerpt from a report on Ma Jun produced as part of a RAIA research programme on climate leaders. For a full picture of Ma Jun’s climate leadership, including the sources, read the full report. This project was fully financed by IE University’s School of Politics, Economics and Global Affairs and School of Science and Technology.
Authors: Sami Kayani Mahmood Kausar, Viktoria Vekova & Daniela Bermudez Bolivar
Editor: Réka Baranyai
Project Lead: Dario Hasenstab
