Environmental protection abiders enjoy smooth progress while those who fail to uphold environmental protection face numerous restrictions.

The Ministry of Ecology and Environment recently released a series of problems discovered during the central ecological protection inspections. For instance, the environmental issues of Jiangxi County Hongjin Rare Earth Co., Ltd. of China Minmetals Group have remained unresolved for a long time and the rectification was carried out in a perfunctory manner; the environmental violations of Shanghai Zhenhua Group were particularly prominent, and the public strongly criticized them; in Chongqing, the elimination of backward production capacity was lagging behind, and the Yongnian Cement Factory had been illegally discharging pollutants for a long time. 

Publicly disclosing environmental issues and exposing the information to the public for supervision is necessary; on the other hand, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment also stated that it will improve the "green light for those who abide by environmental protection and restrictions for those who violate it" credit joint reward and punishment framework, promoting enterprises to continuously improve their environmental behaviors and enhance their environmental performance. 

The environmental credit evaluation results have been increasingly widely applied in many fields. For example, many commercial banks have adopted differentiated credit management measures based on the evaluation results, deepening "green credit"; several provinces have clearly set the entry threshold for government procurement based on the evaluation results. The "Notice on Improving the Differential Pricing Policy Based on Environmental Credit Evaluation Results" issued by the Development and Reform Commission of Jiangsu Province and the Department of Ecology and Environment of Jiangsu Province stipulates that starting from July 1, 2019, for enterprises with relatively serious environmental credit violations (red level) and severe environmental credit violations (black level), their electricity prices will be increased by 0.05 yuan and 0.10 yuan per kilowatt-hour respectively on the basis of the current electricity price standard. A differentiated sewage treatment fee policy is also implemented, making environmental violators not only face restrictions everywhere but also face real monetary penalties. 

Jiangsu and Hunan provinces have explored the implementation of environmental credit evaluation work earlier. Since 2012, starting from the provincial environmental protection department, the evaluation has been carried out and gradually extended to the grassroots level; Shaanxi began to establish a three-level evaluation system of provinces, cities and counties in 2018. All three provinces have placed the full disclosure of the entire process of environmental credit evaluation in an important position, through standardized program design, making important information in key links easily accessible to the public. To ensure the accuracy of the data, an environmental credit information platform has been established to achieve the high integration of relevant environmental management data, making the evaluation process more accurate, comprehensive and timely, and improving the precision of the evaluation results. Since the entire evaluation process is disclosed to enterprises, it is convenient for enterprises to "benchmark" and identify their shortcomings, and make improvements while being evaluated. In the process of environmental credit evaluation, dozens of enterprises in Nantong City, Changsha City and relevant counties and districts accelerate their rectification efforts each year to avoid being rated as poor or worse grades. 

Timely public disclosure of important information and face-to-face communication with enterprises, building an environmental credit information system, breaking the information silos is very important for the establishment and improvement of the environmental credit information system. According to statistics, the environmental credit management system of Jiangsu Province has collected information from all environmental management fields in the province, and pushed 30 million pieces of information to the provincial credit information platform in 2017; the enterprise environmental credit evaluation management platform of Hunan Province pushed over 10,000 pieces of important information such as environmental administrative penalties in 2017. These information provide a basis for joint punishment by other departments, such as 26 banking institutions in Nantong City revised the green credit management methods and directly embedded the enterprise credit evaluation results into the credit approval system, directly linking it to whether the credit approval is granted, the difficulty of guarantee methods, the size of credit line and the interest rate of loans.