Department of Environmental Planning and Management

The Department of Environmental Planning and Management (DEPM) is one of the earliest institutions to offer corresponding education and research in China, which started as the Teaching and Research Division of Environmental Planning and Management in1981. Then in 1988, the Ministry of Education officially established it as a major. The department started enrolling undergraduate students in 1989 and was formally expanded as a department in 2015. After forty-year development, the DEMP has become a unique talent-cultivation-and-scientific-research base in China's environmental planning and management field. DEPM has 16 faculty members, including 9 professors and 7 associate professors, all of whom hold doctoral degrees. DEPM has one Creative Research Group of the National Natural Science Foundation, one National Teaching Team, one National Teaching Master, one Ministry of Education Changjiang Scholar, two National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, and three National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars.

DEPM has built teaching and research platforms such as the Environmental Management and Policy Research Center of Nanjing University-Jiangsu Provincial Environmental Protection Agency, the National Virtual Reality Experimental & Educational Center for Socio-economic Environment System (jointly established with the School of Management and Engineering), and the Environment, Health and Safety Academy at NJU. Meanwhile, the subject outline is significant for "State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse" "National Experimental Teaching Center for Environmental Science and Engineering," and "National Engineering Technology Research Center for Organic Toxic Pollutant Control and Resource Utilization."

DEPM is characteristic and interdisciplinary, emphasizing both theory, technology and application. On the one hand, it regulates the socio-economic environment system from both strategic and policy perspectives to prevent environmental pollution and ecological damage and to achieve coordinated economic, social, and environmental development. On the other hand, it studies the mechanism of resource and environmental effects caused by human activities from the perspective of the life cycle of human activities, resource consumption, pollution emissions, environmental fate, and environmental effects, providing theoretical basis for regulating the socio-economic environment system. Since four decades ago, the EPM department has developed characteristic focus areas such as environmental assessment, environmental economic policy, environmental health and risk assessment, environmental process simulation and control, material cycle and its environmental effects. Also, EPM has undertaken more than 50 national scientific research projects and published more than 300 SCI papers in top journals such as PNAS, Nature Sustainability, Nature Communication, Nature Energy, ES&T, etc. 

Following the philosophy of "comprehensive cultivation, strengthening foundation, and teaching according to aptitude," EPM has formed a complete talent cultivation system. This means you can prepare for a new career or advance in your current position with undergraduate, academic master, professional master, doctoral, and postdoctoral programs. It has built a characteristic core course system covering environmental planning, environmental management, environmental monitoring, environmental system analysis, hydrology, atmospheric science, environmental impact assessment, environmental policy analysis, environmental economics, and environmental information systems. In 2004, EPM won the second prize of the National Teaching Achievement Award, and Environmental Science, written by EPM, was approved as a national-level quality course in the following year. In 2011, the second edition of Environmental Science was rated as a national-level quality textbook. Then in 2012, the course, Environmental Science Principles, was rated as a national-level quality video open course. The "Virtual Simulation Experiment for Material Recycling Processes" was rated as a national-level virtual simulation experiment teaching project in 2018. 

The EPM department has frequent international academic exchange activities, and it has established long-term cooperation with universities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Hong Kong. In the past decade, the employment tracking survey results of undergraduate alumni in EPM show that more than 85% of them choose to pursue further studies in great universities at home and abroad, and about 15% pf them entered government departments, institutions, and research institutes, etc. The EPM alumni has a broad career path.




Meet the Leadership Team of EPM

Yuan, Zengwei

Department Lead

Responsible for discipline construction, undergraduate and graduate programs




Huang, Lei

Deputy Director

Responsible for graduate programs




Liu, Beibei

Deputy Director

Responsible for undergraduate programs