Clearer Skies Over China: Reconciling Air Quality, Climate, and Economic Goals

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments The research of this book expands the inquiry into local and global air pollution in China of our 2007 edited volume, Clearing the Air: The Health and Economic Damages of Air Pollution in China, also from MIT Press. That study grew from a mandate in the mid-1990s of the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE) to bring scholars together from across disciplines to jointly address environmental research topics. Building on that work, the current volume presents a new collaborative effort of researchers from various institutions in China and the United States to improve our knowledge of the complex web relating public policy, economic growth, energy use, local air quality, and the global atmosphere. This research was conducted over 2007–2012 and was orchestrated by the China Project of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University, in collaboration with several schools of Tsinghua University. The China Project was established by the HUCE and from the outset has been chaired by Michael B. McElroy of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and SEAS and directed by one of us (Nielsen). The simulation of atmospheric transport and chemistry in this book was led by Yuxuan Wang of the Center for Earth System Science at Tsinghua University; Wang developed the China-specific, “nested” version of the GEOS-Chem atmospheric model in her Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, advised by McElroy, and in a series of subsequent scientific articles.1 She now leads the China side of the Harvard-Tsinghua collaboration that collects data for use in the model at an atmospheric measurement station built by the team near Beijing in 2004, led on the Harvard side by J. William Munger. The comprehensive emissions inventory used here was constructed at Harvard by Yu Zhao, with central contributions from Yu Lei, integrating and improving on the extensive work of their respective Ph.D. dissertations at what was then called the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering (DESE, now School of Environment) at Tsinghua. Zhao’s Ph.D. research had been advised by Jiming Hao viii Preface and Acknowledgments (who also led the air pollution component of Clearing the Air), and Lei’s by Kebin He. Other researchers collaborated with Zhao or Lei at Tsinghua or Harvard, including Lei Duan, Shuxiao Wang, Qiang Zhang, and Wei Wei. The health damage research of the book was conducted by Yu Lei at SEAS and builds on his work in a prior study with He and other colleagues at Tsinghua DESE, Xiaochuan Pan of the Peking University School of Public Health, and the Chinese and U.S. environmental protection agencies. Lei also drew strongly from chapters in Clearing the Air by colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health, led by Jonathan I. Levy (now at Boston University), James K. Hammitt, and Ying Zhou (now at Emory University), all of whom also gave early advice. Lei completed the agricultural damage assessment at SEAS with our advice, the impressive resources of the Fung and Harvard-Yenching libraries, and research assistance from Samantha Go (who also assisted us on many other tasks for this book). The economic model used to study the impact of policy on energy use and economic growth was constructed by Jing Cao, Dale W. Jorgenson, and one of us (Ho), and elements of the model formed parts of Cao’s Ph.D. thesis at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. This effort built on earlier work done with Richard Garbaccio and with substantial assistance from Shantong Li and Jianwu He from the China Development Research Center. Jorgenson also led the economics component in the previous Clearing the Air. We owe deep gratitude to the friends and colleagues named above who led the work on individual chapters and to their collaborators. Coordinating such a large research team from such diverse fields into an integrated project was a complex task, taking a number of years and covering long distances. This task was possible because of the key participants’ patience with the inevitable delays and their willingness to learn from, instruct, and accommodate the needs of other members of the team. Many project meetings and multiple rounds of reworking the research and revising the papers and book chapters took place. Progress reports and drafts of this research were presented at seminars or workshops at both the Washington-based ChinaFAQs program and the Beijing office of the World Resources Institute, the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, Tsinghua University School of Economics and...