Abstract: With the severe situation of China’s environmental pollution, the public is paying an increasing attention on this issue. Thus, this paper explores the difference of environmental attention in the pollution types and the regional levels based on big data. It is found that the attention is mostly focused on PM2.5, while less on water pollution and soil pollution; as for the regional difference, attention on the northern and eastern regions is the highest, while it is the smallest on the northwest; as for the city difference, the top ten cities on the list of pollution type attention are also the top ten cities which pay close attention to green development. Then by taking the panel data of 29 provinces from 2012 to 2016 as the samples, this paper conducts a further study. The findings show that improvement of the attentions on air pollution and water pollution could significantly promote the investments of the local governments in pollution control; comparatively speaking, the investments in pollution control are more sensitive to the changes of air pollution attention. Therefore, it is suggested to guild more people and investors to join in pollution control based on the current growingly strong attentions on environmental pollution, to establish and improve China’s ecological environment monitoring and early warning system, and to comprehensively strengthen the protection of ecological environment.

Key words: big data; environmental pollution; net users’ attentions; pollution control investments