Recently, the Chinese Journal of Environmental Law (CJEL, ISSN: 2468-6034), an English-language academic journal sponsored by the Institute of Environmental Law of Wuhan University and published in cooperation with Brill, a leading international academic publisher, has been officially listed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESSI) database of Web of Science. The included papers are backdated to January 1, 2019. This is the early entry of China's law journals into the ESCI, and the first Chinese environmental law journal to enter the ESCI. This entry indicated that the academic quality and international influence of the Journal have been recognized by the international academic community, which has laid a solid foundation for the next entry into the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) database.

ESCI is a new international journal citation indexing database released by Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters IP & Science) in 2015, and is one of the subsets included in the Web of Science, the world's authoritative database of scholarly information; the other three major journal databases in the Web of Science core collection are: SCIE (Science Citation Index Expanded), SSCI (Social Sciences Citation Index) and A&HCI (Arts & Humanities Citation Index). ESCI is committed to providing a global resource of high quality journal data, offering a broad academic perspective on emerging areas of research. Access to the ESCI database is a prerequisite for a journal to be selected as an SSCI journal source.

The Chinese Journal of Environmental Law is the first formal academic publication of its kind in the Chinese environmental law community. It was officially launched in 2017 and is co-edited by Professors Qin Tianbao and Ben Boer of the Institute of Environmental Law, with renowned environmental law scholars from around the world as advisory and editorial members. Since its inception, the Journal has aimed to build a window for quality dialogue and cooperation between Chinese and foreign environmental law scholars and to become a first-class international academic exchange platform. Institutional development, compliance and enforcement issues in areas such as biodiversity law, climate change law, energy law, environmental assessment law, marine environment law, natural resources law, planning law, pollution prevention and control law and environmental tribunals are its focus.

Since its inception, the Journal has been published in five consecutive volumes and nine issues. The Journal adopted the internationally accepted double-anonymous review system(submissions can be found at http://www.editorialmanager.com/CJEL/default.aspx). To encourage academic exchange and dissemination, the Journal adopts the Open Access publication model, and any reader can access the relevant articles for free (free access guide: https://brill.com/view/journals/cjel/4/2 /cjel.4.issue-2.xml), and all articles will also be searchable in Web of Science.

Edited by Yuan Yuhang & Wu Liuqing