Developing a coordinated international effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions requires, among other things, that countries have confidence in each other’s capacity to monitor and mitigate their GHG emissions. Reliable emissions data in turn relies on the existence of government department systems that make energy and environmental information transparent and publicly available. In May of 2008, the Chinese government took a critical step toward furthering environmental transparency by adopting a pair of sweeping disclosure measures — China's State Council Open Government Information Regulations and the Ministry of Environmental Protection’s Environmental Information Disclosure Measures — which for the first time required that government bodies at all levels ensure pollution information is publicly available. The Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) and the Natural Resources Defense Council developed a Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI) to carry out a systematic assessment of the first year of implementation for these regulations.