Jin Leshan is a professor at the College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University; and the executive director of the China Eco-compensation Policy Research Center. He obtained his PhD degree in environmental economics in 1997 from the China Agricultural University, and joined the Environmental Economics and Policy Training Program of the World Bank Institute in 1998.
Main fields of his teaching, research, and consultation include eco-compensation, payment for environmental services, natural resources management, and rural development. He teaches Environmental and Natural Resources Economics for the graduate students, and Environment and Development for the undergraduate students. He has been the principal investigator or team leader of a number of projects on eco-compensation, poverty reduction, and/or rural development, such as (i) the comprehensive eco-compensation policy framework in the poor regions (2016-2017), commissioned by the NDRC; (ii) grassland eco-compensation impacts on herders with different scale of grasslands (2013–2015), funded by the China Social Science Foundation; (iii) Chishui payments for watershed services for globally significant biodiversity protection (2014–2018), funded by GEF; (iv) Gansu eco-compensation legal and policy framework (2013), ADB; (v) Knowledge Hub for Eco-compensation and Green Development (2014), ADB; (vi) community-based adaptation to climate change in rural areas (2012), SDC; and (vii) Yanqing eco-compensation mechanism study (2011), Beijing Municipal Government.