The Environment for Development (EfD) initiative has announced the winners of its 2025 Policy Impact Award. The award goes to a research team consisting of Professor Zhang Bing (Nanjing University of Finance and Economics), Professor Liu Mengdi (University of International Business and Economics), and Professor Xu Jintao (Peking University).
EfD is a global research network established in 2007, dedicated to promoting poverty reduction and sustainable development through environmental economics research. The EfD Policy Impact Award recognizes research that has made outstanding contributions to policy practice and social change. The winning team’s research focuses on corporate environmental information disclosure. Using rigorous empirical methods including large-scale randomized controlled trials, the team demonstrated how information disclosure can activate multi-dimensional governance mechanisms to enhance environmental governance outcomes. Their findings have been published in top-tier international journals such as the American Economic Review (AER) and PNAS. The team has also worked closely with China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment and other relevant agencies, significantly influencing the environmental information disclosure practices of over 80,000 Chinese enterprises.
The EfD Award Committee noted that the team’s research has not only deepened academic understanding of the interaction between information disclosure and governance mechanisms but has also driven systemic reforms in environmental governance models at the policy level. Committee members included senior experts from the World Bank, the Prime Minister’s Office of Rwanda, the Ministry of Finance of Kenya, and the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development of Uganda.
This award highlights Professor Zhang Bing and his team’s international influence in the fields of environmental economics and policy research, as well as their important contributions to advancing global sustainable development and innovation in environmental governance.
