Ma Jun’s initiatives have been successful in making environmental information more accessible and using it to support action against pollution.
The Blue Map
The Blue Map was designed to make government environmental information not only publicly available but also genuinely usable. By giving citizens the tools to identify polluters, it aimed to generate public pressure on companies to reduce their emissions and on local governmental authorities to enforce environmental regulations.
Judged against this goal, the initiative can be considered partially successful for two main reasons. First, it managed to centralize official environmental data into a single platform, which made pollution information easier to access and use. Citizens have used this in practice: they have monitored local environmental conditions, identified specific polluters, and then reported their suspected violations through the platform. Secondly, it created the data infrastructure that has been used as the foundation for IPE’s later initiatives, including the Green Supply Chain Initiative, the Corporate Information Transparency Index (CITI), and the Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI).
However, there is limited evidence that the Blue Map itself has directly reduced corporate pollution. While later IPE initiatives built on Blue Map data provide evidence that public data encouraged companies to improve their environmental performance and governments to strengthen enforcement, there is no evidence to show that the Blue Map alone caused these changes.
Even without clear evidence of this direct impact, IPE’s ability to operate and expand the Blue Map was an achievement in itself, due to the context it operates in—China’s highly regulated NGO environment. Organisations that rely on foreign funding, cooperate with certain overseas organisations, openly challenge government policies, or organize public opposition can face restrictions.
Ma Jun was able to avoid government interference due to his approach of positioning IPE as a government partner rather than a challenger. IPE chose to work with the information the government was willing to let people see, rather than challenging these limits. IPE did not criticize the government or carry out its own investigations; instead, it relied on already published government data. This differed from other Chinese NGOs such as Friends of Nature, Green Earth Volunteers and Green Watershed, which relied on advocacy and public criticism and therefore faced a more restricted space for their work.
By working within the existing system instead, IPE was able to benefit from China’s growing focus on environmental transparency after 2008. As more data became public, IPE turned it into useful tools for citizens, companies, investors and regulators. This approach helped IPE gain government trust and become one of the few environmental NGOs able to influence environmental governance in China. In 2019, Ma Jun was appointed a Special Observer by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE), which reflects the trust the IPE had built through this cooperative approach.
By relying on digital technology, the Blue Map also succeeded in giving many citizens a more active role in environmental governance. China’s rapid growth in internet use, smartphone ownership and digital infrastructure during the 2010s enabled millions of people to access the Blue Map and engage with environmental information in ways that had not previously been possible. Citizens could monitor local environmental conditions, identify polluting companies and report environmental violations directly through the platform. As of 2025, more than 10 million users have downloaded Blue Map and over 13,000 suspected environmental violations have been reported via the platform. These reports were then sent to local environmental authorities, where as of 2025, 80% received a government response. This has strengthened public control on both corporations and local authorities and brought the citizens into the environmental governance process as active agents instead of passive information recipients.
The Blue Map’s impact has also extended beyond China. IPE has been invited to share its experience with countries including Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Environmental NGOs in Africa have also shown interest in developing similar platforms to the Blue Map. This international interest shows that the Blue Map created an appealing model for using public environmental data that could be adapted beyond China.
However, as discussed, there is limited evidence on whether the Blue Map itself has directly reduced corporate pollution through its engagement of the public. Despite this, IPE’s later initiatives—the GSCI, CITI, and PITI—which use the data collected through the Blue Map, provide evidence of this impact. These results are explored in the following sections.
Beyond the limited evidence of its direct impact on corporate pollution and changing the enforcement practices of local governments, the Blue Map also faces limitations in both the information it can provide and who it can reach. Firstly, the initiative is dependent on official government information. Due to this, the platform is only as effective as the quality, completeness and timeliness of government reporting and can only show information local governments made available. As mentioned before, China’s disclosure framework expanded significantly from 2008 onward, requiring local authorities to publish environmental monitoring, enforcement, and pollution data. Implementation, however, has been uneven. Some provinces disclosed records fully and on time; others released partial or delayed data or revised records sporadically. Local governments have also sometimes prioritised economic growth over enforcement, in some cases reportedly tipping off factories ahead of inspections. As a result, the quality and reliability of the data on the Blue Map vary by region. This means that the platform is unable to give a fully consistent national picture of environmental performance.
Second, the platform’s reach may be limited by uneven digital access across China. Blue Map has been downloaded more than 10 million times nationwide, but regional download data is not public, so there is no way to confirm how much of that reach extends to rural areas versus major cities. What can be said is that internet and smartphone use tends to be higher in urban areas than in less developed and rural regions, where weaker digital infrastructure could make accessing the platform harder.
Lastly, the Blue Map creates pressure for environmental action, but it cannot force companies or governments to act. Its impact, therefore, depends on what happens after pollution is exposed—on whether authorities enforce environmental rules and whether companies respond to public pressure.
Green Supply Chain Initiative
The GSCI’s ultimate goal was to reduce pollution by Chinese manufacturers through encouraging multinational companies to use their commercial influence to improve the performance of their suppliers. The initiative can be considered successful in achieving this objective with regard to many foreign multinational companies with Chinese supply chains.
First, it persuaded a large number of multinational companies to join the initiative. Second, participating companies actively used the GSCI to identify suppliers with environmental violations and encourage them to take corrective action. As a result, thousands of suppliers rectified environmental violations, disclosed emissions data, and improved their environmental performance. In addition, the initiative laid the foundation for several later IPE initiatives, including the Corporate Information Transparency Index (CITI), the Corporate Climate Action Transparency Index (CATI), and the Global Business Accountability Map, which highlights CATI scores and company locations.
Its key innovation was connecting individual factories to the multinational brands that bought from them. By that connection, the GSCI extended environmental responsibility across entire supply chains rather than looking at each factory in isolation. In the past, there were also initiatives that aimed to improve corporate environmental transparency but they did not go beyond assessing the performance of individual factories. For example, the GreenWatch Program, introduced in 1999, rated firms’ environmental performance using a color-coded rating system. However, it took a factory-by-factory approach and failed to connect the factories to the multinationals buying from them. Therefore, the initiative could not use the pressure from multinationals to incentivize the local manufacturers. GSCI closed that gap.
GSCI was successful in building widespread corporate participation. By 2024, more than 700 brands across over 20 industries, including Apple, Walmart, Nike, Adidas, H&M, and Huawei, had voluntarily joined the initiative. This demonstrates that the GSCI’s first underlying assumption—that multinational companies would be willing to participate because of the commercial and reputational benefits of improving supply-chain management—proved correct.
Huawei, for example, states on its website that it has been a GSCI participant since 2011 and uses the Blue Map’s environmental data during supplier audits to identify environmental violations and monitor supplier compliance.
Apple’s joining of GSCI shows a different path to the same result. In 2010, Apple was named alongside 29 other companies in a report on heavy metal pollution linked to IT supply chains in China, published by IPE and its coalition partners. Apple was the only company that did not respond, citing a policy against disclosing supplier information. In response, IPE and partner NGOs launched a public campaign called “Poisoned Apple” to pressure the company over this lack of transparency. Apple faced public criticism as a result, which made it reverse course in 2011. It approached Chinese environmental groups and began pushing its suppliers to clean up their practices. Later, Apple also joined GSCI and has since ranked at or near the top of IPE’s CITI index. Apple itself announced in 2019 that it was the first company to receive the CITI Master designation after ranking first in CITI for the previous five years.
The initiative itself did not cause Apple’s initial change: that came from the reputational damage of the public campaign in 2010. What GSCI provided came afterward. It gave Apple, and later many other companies, a structure through which reputational commitments could be turned into action. This illustrates a division of labor: public pressure is what motivates companies to act in the first place, while GSCI is what allows that motivation to turn into an action that can be tracked over time.
Due to the participation of these companies and their pressure on manufacturers, over 37,000 suppliers have improved their environmental performance and transparency. This demonstrates that the initiative’s second underlying assumption also proved correct: suppliers were willing to improve their environmental performance when faced with the commercial risk of losing business from multinational customers.
The initiative addressed one of the major challenges in China’s environmental system: the difficulty of holding domestic suppliers accountable when they operate far from public view. By exploiting the reputational vulnerability of multinational corporations, Ma Jun created a mechanism capable of influencing factories that would otherwise remain difficult to monitor. This strategy allowed environmental standards to reach thousands of manufacturing facilities without requiring political or regulatory reforms.
Ultimately, the Green Supply Chain Initiative illustrates Ma Jun’s broader approach to environmental governance. Rather than viewing environmental protection solely as a regulatory issue, he treated it as a problem of incentives, information, and accountability. By connecting environmental performance to commercial relationships, the initiative transformed environmental compliance into a business concern and extended environmental accountability throughout global supply chains. In doing so, it provided an innovative alternative to traditional regulatory approaches and became one of the most influential supply-chain sustainability initiatives operating in China today.
When it comes to domestic companies with low integration into global value chains, however, the initiative has been relatively less successful. Multinational corporations are more exposed to reputational risks from foreign consumers, investors, NGOs and sustainability standards and, as such, have greater incentives to enhance their supplier management practices compared to domestic companies. This difference is visible in the current CITI rankings, where many of the highest-performing brands are multinational companies.
Thus, while the initiative has proven effective at incorporating environmental factors into the management of global supply chains, it alone will not be sufficient to achieve meaningful long-term emissions reductions unless there are complementary government measures, effective enforcement, and increased corporate commitments relating to climate change. Its most important legacy is that it shows how transparency and market-based incentives can be used to hold certain companies accountable for their environmental footprints.
Corporate Information Transparency Index (CITI) and Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI)
While the GSCI encourages global brands to improve the environmental performance of their supply chains, CITI publicly evaluates their efforts. PITI applies a similar transparency approach to local governments by assessing cities on their environmental information disclosure.
PITI’s impact has been pushing multiple local governments to become compliant with existing disclosure laws. The index tracks whether cities disclosed the information they were already legally required to release, such as pollution monitoring data, enterprise emissions, environmental enforcement records, environmental impact assessments, and public complaint mechanisms. Because these rankings are public, cities that scored poorly faced reputational pressure compared to their peers. This pressure translated into actual change, demonstrating that PITI had a real impact. The average PITI score across cities rose from 31 in 2008 to 57 in 2019, showing that cities steadily closed the gap between what the law required and what they actually disclosed.
PITI did not just have a “transparency” effect; it also had a measurable environmental impact. The results of a large-scale randomised controlled trial revealed that cities in the program saw about a 90% rise in environmental inspections and a 37% reduction in pollution violations. Due to this strengthened enforcement, air quality also improved: PM₂.₅, PM₁₀, and Air Quality Index levels each fell by around 8-10%. Researchers estimated that an additional 2,008 premature deaths were prevented in participating cities, a figure that could be more than 24,000 if such changes were implemented across the country.
These results reveal PITI’s mechanism: although it did not reduce pollution directly, it gave incentives to local governments to do so. By making environmental performance publicly comparable across cities, it gave officials a reason to enforce laws that were already on the books but poorly applied. So PITI’s real contribution to cutting pollution was making information public in a way that motivated stronger enforcement. This shows that transparency alone can be enough to push governments to follow their own laws more strictly.
CITI extends this same logic to corporate environmental governance. CITI is the world’s first quantitative system for assessing how companies manage environmental risk across their supply chains, drawing on public government records, supplier responses, corrective actions, and companies’ own environmental disclosures.
CITI’s impact is difficult to evaluate separately from the Green Supply Chain Initiative, because the two mechanisms work together. GSCI gives companies a way to identify environmental problems in their supply chains and push suppliers toward corrective action, while CITI publicly evaluates and ranks how effectively they do this.
Because of this, it is hard to say whether a company’s behavior changed because it participated in GSCI, or because CITI made its performance visible to the public. What we do know is this: the number of brands evaluated by CITI grew from 147 to 167 between 2014 and 2015. This growth means companies kept choosing to participate in GSCI, and therefore CITI, even knowing that doing so risked a poor public ranking. That itself is evidence CITI worked as an incentive: companies judged that being ranked, risk of a bad score included, was still better than staying outside the system altogether.
Together, CITI and GSCI have caused real behavior change. The number of suppliers responding to environmental violations, remediation requests, or disclosure requirements grew from just over 500 in 2014 to more than 25,000 in 2023.
A limitation for both indices, however, is that neither can force real commitment. CITI depends on companies choosing to participate and respond to reputational pressure, since it is not a binding regulation. PITI works differently: cities are evaluated regardless of whether they want to be, but how much they actually care about their ranking and, therefore, how well they comply with disclosure laws can vary by region. As a result, CITI works better with multinationals exposed to international consumers and investors than with domestic firms, while PITI’s impact depends on how seriously local governments take their ranking.
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
