Professor Bai's research focuses on several frontiers of urban sustainability science and policy, including:

• Understanding the structure, function and processes of urban social ecological system
• Drivers and impacts of urbanization, including impact of landscape urbanization on food   production
• Urban environmental evolution
• Urban metabolism-  urban energy, water, food, and material flows and social economic     determinants
• Cities and climate change
• Urban policy and governance
• Urban resilience and cities as complex system
• Low carbon, eco-city development
• Sustainability experiments, system innovation, transition and transformation
• Concept and method development for cross-case analysis 
• Regional development and environmental policy in China
• Urban futures in the Anthropocene