Dudek receives the Friendship Award in 2004.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Daniel Dudek, an American environmental expert, says China is making steady progress with policies. Liu Xiangrui reports.

Daniel Dudek believes the market can be used to solve environmental problems. And, at a time when China's top leadership is talking about an ecological civilization, his idea resonates here.

"By now I have no doubt what is going to happen, it's really the question of details," the 69-year-old vice-president of the Environmental Defense Fund, a New York-based nonprofit, says of China's green transformation in the future.

Dudek has devoted himself to environmental work for more than 40 years. In 1979, he earned a PhD in agricultural economics from University of California, and worked in the US Department of Agriculture, among other places before joining EDF as a senior economist in 1986, to "bridge the gap between theory and practice".

Dudek specializes in the reduction and control of atmospheric pollutants through the use of markets to control emissions from stationary and mobile sources.