Air Quality and Human Health: An Interview with Roger Peng

Roger Peng, an Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, recently spoke at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies about his research estimating the health benefits of reducing particulate matter air pollution. He discussed common study designs for understanding environmental pollution health impacts as well as the ways reducing air pollution may improve human health.

I sat down for a brief chat with Dr. Peng on air quality indicators for human health and their policy relevance. Our interview is available here. On another note – Dr. Peng co-authors the Simply Statistics blog – a really excellent resource for those interested in data and statistics!

Introducing “On the Environment”

The Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy is a joint initiative between Yale Law School and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and we see a lot of interesting and inspiring people come through the doors of both schools throughout the course of a year.

These visionaries will stay a few days, give a lecture or two, and then be on their way again—sometimes with very little record of their visit, the insights they’ve shared, or the passion they’ve breathed into the community inspiring action, change, and possibility.

We launched On the Environment, a podcast series hosted by Center staff and students, to better document these visits and, most importantly, to invite the larger community into the conversation we’re having here about key issues in environmental science, law and policymaking.

The first six podcasts are linked below, but please keep your eye on the On The Environment iTunes or SoundCloud sites, because we will update frequently.

We hope you enjoy the podcasts and the speakers as much as we’ve enjoyed producing the series.

Episode 1: Marissa Knodel, a research assistant at the Center, visits with Andrew Guzman about his new book Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change, which explores the real-world consequences of climate change.

Episode 2: (part 1 and part 2): Marissa Knodel talks with Julian Aguon, a writer, activist and attorney, about his work on human and indigenous rights under international law.

Episode 3: (part 1, part 2, and part 3): Aaron Reuben, a Center research assistant, talks with Rolling Stone Contributing Editor Jeff Goodell about his work, the future of environmental journalism, and geoengineering.

If you have comments or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at ycelp@yale.edu.

Interview with Dr. Garvin Heath on Shale Gas and Climate Change

On Tuesday, March 5, I caught up with Dr. Garvin Heath, a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), to discuss research that he recently completed on the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from shale gas produced from Texas’ Barnett Shale. 

Dr. Heath’s research is part of the same Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis (JISEA) report on “Natural Gas and the Transformation of the U.S. Energy Sector: Electricity” that his NREL colleague Jeffrey Logan discussed as part of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy’s Policy Workshop Webinar Series on Emerging Issues in Shale Gas Development last month. Dr. Heath’s work also provides additional perspective and data on the shale gas-climate change links that Environmental Defense Fund scientist Dr. Ramon Alvarez discussed with our Center in his webinar last fall.

You can listen to my interview with Dr. Heath and view some slides that he prepared on his research below. You can also download his slides separately from the interview here.

Garvin Heath Interview from YCELP on Vimeo.

To learn more about this research and that of Dr. Heath's colleagues, you can download the full JISEA report here. In addition to Dr. Heath’s lifecycle emissions assessment (Chapter 1 of the report), the JISEA report also includes information on shale gas development’s legal and regulatory frameworks (Chapter 2; see also Professor Hannah Wiseman’s webinar from last December), water-related practices (Chapter 3), and electric power futures (Chapter 4; see also Jeffrey Logan’s webinar on this chapter from last month).

What’s in a name? That which we call ‘PM2.5,’ China doesn’t

The official Chinese media reported this week, China’s National Committee for Terms in Sciences and Technology has been meeting to standardize a Chinese name for “PM_2.5,” a harmful air pollutant that has negative human health effects. While PM_2.5 is the scientific nomenclature for fine particulate matter that has a diameter of 2.5 microns or less, there was no consistency with which it was referred to in the Chinese media and academic reports. Instead, mixed references to PM_2.5 as “particulate matter in the lungs” (keru feikeliwu), “fine particulate matter” (xi keliwu), “fine particles” (xi lizi), and “ultrafine particles” (chaoxi keliwu) have created enough confusion for the government to look into the (fine) matter.

Chinese netizens have chimed in as well, with suggestions on what the Chinese term for PM_2.5 might be, ranging from the scientific to the sarcastic to the downright skeptical. On Sina Weibo and pointed out by a blogger on China Offbeat, netizens have sarcastically suggested “China good particles” (zhongguo hao keli), “Breathing Pain,” “Life 25% Shorter Index,” “Standing Right in Front of You But You Cannot See Me Index.” Some of the more creative names with political undertones include “harmony particle” (a pointed jab at China’s censorship of sensitive issues), “pimin 2.5” (PiMin, the same initials as ‘PM’ refers to citizens who have been treated poorly by their government), and “peiming 2.5” (payment of life 2.5). 

As PM_2.5 has already become a household name in China (see this advertisement for a PM_2.5-themed rock concert in Beijingand this argument by a Chinese newspaper that PM_2.5 is actually better known), it may not be necessary for the government to come up with its own moniker to fit Chinese-specific conditions.  We’ve seen how politically-controversial naming can be. Until the term ‘PM_2.5’broke into mainstream Chinese media and consciousness, poor air quality days and haze were often referred to as “fog” (wu) or “haze” (wumai) in Chinese, which had the effect of downplaying the role of anthropogenic contribution and instead connotes weather and climactic-related factors instead. Though the latter do undoubtedly play a part in Beijing’s poor air quality, calling pollution “fog” has underplayed the reality of air pollution’s role in causing the “haze” shrouding the city.

For now, at least, it seems that the government has decided on “fine particles” (xi keliwu) for the Chinese name of PM_2.5.

***

Angel Hsu is a doctoral student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and project manager of the 2012 Environmental Performance Index.

William Miao is a first-year Master of Environmental Management (MEM' 14) candidate at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. His research focus is on the application of integrated environmental tools and frameworks at corporate, industrial, and national levels. Originally a chemical engineer from Auckland, New Zealand, his previous work involved risk management for oil and gas production, waste to energy research, and life-cycle assessment for the steel industry.

The Environmental Performance Index Responds to Critics

The Environmental Performance Index (EPI) featured prominently in the recent debate between Peter Foster and David Boyd in Financial Post (The nature debate part 1 and The nature debate part 2, January 25, 2013).

Over the past ten years the EPI has used measureable environmental information to rank countries based on their environmental performance.  The EPI team from Yale and Columbia universities pores over data on the environment, comparing it with wealth, governance, and trade, among many other aspects of well being. First and foremost, we have learned that these relationships are complex, and that a few lines of text often lose the larger message in the data. The debate between Messrs. Foster and Boyd is no exception, and in this case, losing the message of the EPI means losing perspective on the nature of Canada’s environment and economy.

Wealth and the environment

Both Foster and Boyd reference theories on the relationship between wealth and the environment, with Foster arguing the two variables are correlated and Boyd questioning the strength of that relationship. The EPI provides some real-world insight.

EPI data show that although there is a relationship, a nation’s wealth only marginally explains its final EPI ranking. This means that there are other important factors influencing environmental performance. Put differently, economic development matters, but other factors are more important. Although we have not identified every variable, we are confident that environmental performance is not an accident of history and factors such as pragmatic and enforceable environmental safeguards are key.

On climate

Foster notes that Canada scores poorly in the overall EPI and blames our devotion “to official climate alarmism,” arguing that we weigh the Climate Change and Energy category of the EPI too heavily. While Canada does rank 102 out of 132 countries in the Climate Change and Energy analysis, Brunei Darussalam, Czech Republic, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, and Taiwan all manage a better overall EPI rank with a lower Climate score. Furthermore, the Climate Change and Energy category actually receives less weight in the 2012 EPI than it did in 2010—a decrease from 25 percent of the overall EPI score to just 17.5 percent.

In addition, we have anticipated much of Foster’s climate-related concern by choosing CO2 emissions measures that account for his critiques— specifically, differences in wealth and in country size. The EPI indicators that address these concerns are CO2 per GDP (to account for differences in wealth between nations) and CO2 per capita (to account for differences in population size between nations). In the future, perhaps we can cut countries like Canada slack on account of higher latitudes and greater needs for heating—though energy needs for cooling in lower latitudes might balance the equation.

Unequal weights

Foster is also concerned that our Environmental Health objective is not weighted as heavily in the final EPI score as its counterpart objective of Ecosystem Vitality. His concern is valid. Throughout the development of each edition of the EPI we consult with science and policy experts to fine-tune our methodology, and a departure from equal weights within the EPI framework is a signal that we have picked up on something important. It turns out that equal weights do not necessarily mean equal influence (something we discuss briefly in the blog post “the Science and Art of Quantification” and in our upcoming manual “How to Build Green Indices: Learning from the Experience of the Environmental Performance Index”).

For the 2012 EPI, a 50-50 weighting for Environmental Health and Ecosystem Vitality meant that the overall EPI scores were too heavily influenced by performance in the Environmental Health objective alone because of its wider distribution. Countries that perform high in the Environmental Health objective were likely to perform better in the overall EPI, regardless of their scores in Ecosystem Vitality. Both Health and Ecosystems are important and we adjusted the EPI weightings to correct for this imbalance.

An Invitation

Finally, Mr. Foster brushes off the significance of the Environmental Performance Index because of its “murky metrics.” The response here does not require any complicated analysis. Our entire process, from data to methods to the final ranking, is entirely available online and is free and open to the public. Nothing could be less murky. Any journalist, researcher, or policymaker who wishes to dive in is more than welcome, and we are here to help.

On that note, to Messrs. Foster and Boyd: we would like to invite you both to serve on our expert panel for the 2014 EPI. You’ll find that it’s a dynamic group of scientists and practitioners, ready for debate, eager to prepare the best set of tools possible for policymakers.

Beyond ‘Crazy Bad’: Explaining Beijing’s Extreme Air Pollution

Beijing’s air quality once again is making international headlines for off-the-chart measurements of air pollution. Images of Beijing show China’s capital city completely shrouded in gloomy shades of grey. According to Jan. 12 readings of the city’s official real-time air quality monitoring platform, air pollution levels exceeded the upper limit of 500 on the Air Quality Index (click here to read an explanation of China’s newly adopted AQI) in many of Beijing’s districts, meaning that air pollution was beyond “hazardous” levels.  The US Embassy in Beijing, which has been independently monitoring air pollution since the 2008 Olympics,  independently measured and reported AQI values topping 755 .

Infographic created by Monte Kawahara

The most significant contributing pollutant by far, as reported by both the Chinese and US measuring capacities, is fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5. Readings that topped 500 in November 2010 prompted a US Embassy official to tweet that the air was “crazy bad,” although this outtake was quickly recinded.

PM 2.5 – Small Particle, Big Threat

PM 2.5 represents fine particles suspended in the air with a diameter of less than 2.5 microns (about one thirtieth of the width of human hair). Particles of this size are capable of passing through the respiratory track and remaining in the human lungs, causing a range of short-term and chronic conditions such as asthma, lung cancer, and cardiovascular disease.

So how PM 2.5 being measured and reflected in air quality indices, communicated by both the U.S. Embassy and Chinese government? Last March the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) released new national air quality standards and an index, the AQI, for communicating air quality that was more consistent with U.S. standards.  The main difference between the Chinese and U.S. AQIs for PM 2.5 is the pollutant concentration thresholds used. While the U.S has adopted a PM 2.5 concentration threshold close to the World Health Organization (WHO)’s recommended levels of 10 μg/m³, China has opted for thresholds similar to the interim guidelines the WHO has set for developing countries.[JG1]

In Table 1, above, we see US and China AQI breakpoints for PM10 and PM 2.5. Note that the descriptions in column 2 are based on the Chinese AQI standards, not US standards.

Because the official AQI measurements are capped at 500, the real extent of PM 2.5 concentrations citizens faced this past weekend in Beijing are understated. In fact, the PM 2.5 readings of all regions across the city in the evening of Jan. 12 were above 700 μg/m³, peaking at 993 μg/m³)  When the US Embassy reported AQI values above 500 some asked whether their monitors were broken. 

When the US Embassy air monitor started reporting values above 500, some thought these were measurement errors, as the upper-end of the AQI only reaches 500. How were AQI values beyond 500 determined? Vance Wagner, a long-time Beijing air quality analyst, wrote a post explaining the linear estimation of the AQI beyond 500, demonstrating that the US monitor uses the relationship for concentration levels at 400 μg/m³  to 500  μg/m³.

In figure 2, above, we see the relationship between PM 2.5 concentrations and AQI. The red line is based on the China AQI, while the blue is interpolated values used by the US Embassy monitor AQI. Note that the official PM 2.5 concentration to IAQI conversion isn’t linear, an online calculator is available to perform the conversion.

Therefore, the equivalent-AQI of 755 reported by the US Embassy’s monitor, would have corresponded to a PM 2.5 concentration of 668 μg/m³. As a comparison, UN WHO recommends a safe level of PM 2.5 of 15 μg/m³, with an interim goal of 75 μg/m³.

These highly hazardous levels of PM 2.5 have prompted Chinese authorities to urge all residents to remain indoors and to order schools to cancel outdoor activities for children.

What’s Causing the Scale-tipping Smog?

Beijing’s air quality is the result of a complex interaction of many climactic, geographic, and anthropogenic factors. Here are some of the explanations set forth to explain why air quality is so hazardous:

·       Winter weather conditions and “haze”: According the official Chinese news channel, China Daily, the main reason for such record-setting pollution is lingering fog and haze. The article states, “Experts and residents in the worst-hit areas such as Shijiazhuang are becoming increasingly worried about the air pollution brought by frequent winter haze.” In the same article, Ma Xuekuan from the National Meteorological Center attributed the formation of fog and haze to the wet air, little wind, and stable atmosphere conditions common in winter. Hazy, humid and stagnant air are perfect for trapping pollutants such as fine particles, which lead to the smog.  While there is logic to this explanation, as Beijing lacks precipitation during the winter months and a few days without wind prevents pollutants from being blown away, the weather and natural causes can’t be entirely to blame for off-the-charts pollution. Even long-term residents are shocked by the recent smog levels.

·       Heating from coal-fired power plants. Around 80 percent of China’s power comes from coal-fired power plants, although Beijing does have plans to eliminate the capitol’s coal plants by 2020. 

·       Increasing car ownership. Beijing now has 5 million vehicles, and the number is increasing. Authorities are now owning upto these staggering statistics and are beginning to think of more aggressive measures to curb emissiosn from vehicles.

·       Industrial activities in neighboring provinces. Beijing is bordered by Shandong and Hebei provinces, which are some of the most industrially intensive provinces in China. In 2011, according to official Chinese Statistics, Shandong had the third-highest industrial output GDP, while Hebei came in sixth.

·       Agricultural biomass burning. While it is unlikely that the severe pollution in Beijing this month is due to agricultural burning because January is not a harvest month, extreme air pollution last May in Wuhan was due to multiple fires of burning biomass, which puts a significant amount of dust, soot, and particulate matter in the atmosphere.

What can be done?

While China’s recent move to release PM 2.5 data for 74 major cities in China, with more plans to release data for all 113 key environmental protection cities by the end of this year, the beyond 500 AQI readings have called into question whether China should revise its AQI to account for pollution levels beyond the index. The meaningfulness of an index that reads “beyond Index”  in determining the severity of air pollution is questionable. Our observations of the MEP’s official PM 2.5 data in previous months show that air pollution is not as severe on a daily basis for all of China. However, considerations for increasing the scale beyond 500 would be helpful for situations like we’re seeing now. 

The good news is that the Chinese government is being more responsive and transparent than they have in the past. The government has been more open to official media reports covering the severity of air pollution and to citizens publicly airing grievances in media outlets. However, the more challenging task will be how the government can take this momentum and translate it quickly into enforcable policies addressing the root causes of the pollution, instead of shifting blame to uncontrollable, natural factors like wind or climate.  

Troubling Trends for South Africa

Last year the citizens of the Republic of South Africa were preparing their hotels and conference centers for another wave of foreigners to descend upon their shores. This year the revelers of 2010’s World Cup competitions were replaced by the more stoic diplomats of a world climate negotiation (specifically the 17th Congress of the Parties to the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change). Despite the change in dress (business suits over track suits) the results of the proceedings were similar:  much fanfare, some victory, a good deal of disappointment.

For South Africa both events signaled a general desire to take to the world stage and bask in adoration for Africa’s most developed economy - and the newest member of the BRICS emerging economies consortium.  These events, the climate conference in particular, also showed a willingness on the part of South Africa to accept a new, greater role in leading the governance of our planet.

Which is why the latest trends in the environment of South Africa are so troubling.

In the 2012 Environmental Performance Index, published in January by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy, where we are researchers, South Africa ranked 128 out of 132 rated countries, just above Iraq and just below Yemen.  Our index ranks the countries of the world on aggregated measures of environmental performance, in sectors like air and water quality, forest and fisheries protection, regulation of pesticides, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Across the general board (though there are exceptions), South Africa is one of the world’s worst performers and the worst in Africa (which is no small feat, as Oluseyi Fanyanju’s article on Nigeria’s poor performance reveals).

What accounts for this trend?

Analysis of our index points to two key places where South Africa is lagging and, generally, getting worse:  air quality and water quantity.

It should be no surprise that Africa’s greatest greenhouse gas emitter is experiencing worsening air quality. According to the International Energy Association, over 90% of the South African electricity supply is coal-generation based. Compare that to 42% in the United States (no world leader in this regard).[1]  Emissions from this antique power sector, combined with rapid industrialization around urban areas, has created air pollution “hot spots” across the country, where respirable particulate matter concentrations have reached historic unhealthy levels. Though the air situation is improving for some damaging pollutants (notably sulphur dioxides, which contribute to acid rain) air quality in South Africa hovers around the lowest in the world, at least when ecosystem effects are taken into account, and that is not likely to change soon.

Related to its unhealthy energy mix, South Africa - a naturally arid and water-stressed state, with annual rainfall six times lower than the global average – is seeing its small water supply spent on extracting the coal it burns (mining processes demand huge amounts of water) and fueling an expanding mining industry (gold mining in particular). A 2010 report by the Africa Earth Observatory Network found 16 of South Africa's 19 Water Resource Management Areas to be in a marginal or stressed state (meaning current clean water resources do not meet demand). “It seems clear,” the authors reported, “that water shortages are going to occur on a large scale in South Africa, even if the country follows a no-to-very-slow economic growth path.” They estimated that R360 billion, (15% of South Africa’s GDP in 2010) will need to be spent to provide adequate water infrastructure for human populations and stressed ecosystems, unless less water-intensive energy resources are invested in.

Reversing the trend

The social problems facing South Africa as it seeks to spur economic growth are immense, as is the chasm that exists between its haves and have-nots. South Africa has the highest income inequality of any African nation.  And with an unemployment rate just over 24%, this fact isn’t likely to change anytime soon. (An OECD report predicted that the SA economy would have to grow by 7% for over 20 years to achieve a significant reduction in unemployment – current growth rates hover around 3%). As NPR reported earlier this year, a staggering 73% of those unemployed are under the age of 35.

But current environmental trends and an abysmal EPI ranking suggest that South Africa may be heading towards an ecological tipping point.  If economic progress isn’t tied to improving environmental health and justice, South Africa may find it hard to fulfill its ultimate commitment to its citizens – to provide quality lives and real, sustainable livelihoods; recent protests and the spread of violence around unsafe working conditions and low pay at South African mines attest to a failure of current policies to deliver these basic rights.

Though its rivers go dry to fuel coal extraction, and its airways grow dark with smog, it isn’t too late for South Africa to reverse the trend. Real potential exists for renewable energy production across the country. And if South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress, were to make good on their early commitment to invest in renewable energy, new solar and wind power projects could create desperately needed jobs and drive real human and environmental health benefits.

In his opening address at the world’s last climate conference, held in Durban, South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma, called on the leaders of the world to work together to “to save tomorrow today.”[2] We agree. Now might be time for South Africa to lead the way.

Pesky particles: Should we include natural sources of small particulate matter in enviro indicators?

In our cities the byproducts of combustion (in our engines and power plants) meet with the byproducts of life - plant resin off-gases, air-born dusts and sands, ocean sprays and sea salt mists - to create a complex mixture of chemicals that can be harmful to human health.  As Gabriel Isaacman and I reported in the Atlantic last month, even so-called pristine landscapes are not free from this effect.

And that begs the question: what are we to make of natural sources of air pollutants? This was a question posed during the first day of the International Workshop for a Better EPI: Towards a Next Generation of Air Quality Monitoring, held last week at Seoul National University in Korea.

Small diameter particulate matter, so-called PM 10 (less than 10 microns in diameter) and PM 2.5 (less than 2.5 microns), are air pollutants of particular concern. These particles, which can be anything small, from grains of desert dust to particles of coal ash, are small enough to bypass the lung’s natural filters (hairs in your nose, mucus in your throat). They burrow deep into the vulnerable tissues of the lung, where whatever radioactive particles or heavy metals they brought with them can wreck havoc on easily damaged soft tissue. 

All particulate matter, generally, is harmful to human health. At least according to Michael Krzyanowski of the World Health Organization, who presented on global PM monitoring efforts at the conference.

“Epidemiological studies have tried to separate the specific effects of the different components of PM,” he said, referring to efforts to clarify human health outcomes related to PM derived from cars from those related to PM derived from plants. “Either we aren’t there with research,” he said, “Or PM is just too complicated to separate.”

Because we can control the PM that is human-produced, either by limiting power plant emissions or driving fewer car miles, some participants at the conference argued that we should only consider these sources of PM in national inventories and performance metrics.  Countries cannot, generally, limit the PM produced by an ocean breeze or a desert storm - they should not be penalized, or criticized, the argument goes, for having high PM levels from these sources. 

These are fair criticisms. PM levels are currently a leading indicator in our Environmental Performance Index, which ranks the countries of the world on measures of environmental quality. And it is also a pollutant required for control under most rigorous air pollution programs around the world.

But there is evidence that natural PM sources are as harmful to human health as non-natural.  In other words, “we don’t have evidence that non-anthropogenic PM is not-health relevant,” Krzyanowski said.  As such, it is problematic to simply remove this source from environmental metrics.

“Health warnings should include Sahara dust in an index,” Krzyanowski argued, just as much as dust from construction or car emissions. “Yes that is hard to address in management. But it is still important for human health.”

There is no easy answer to this question – what pollutant sources to include in measurements and indices – but later versions of our own EPI may well seek to differentiate among these measures to create a more sophisticated measure of country-by-country  managements obligations and public health risks.

What happens in China doesn’t stay in China: lessons from an international air quality workshop

Pollution does not respect borders.

This old adage is one of the first messages to arise from last week’s International Workshop for a Better Environmental Performance Index (EPI): Towards a Next Generation of Air Quality Monitoring – a workshop jointly hosted by Yale and Columbia Universities and the Asian Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability at the Seoul National University in Korea.

During a technical session on monitoring and modeling of heavy metals, Dr. Seung-Muk Yi of Seoul National University presented his research findings on the sources and movement of mercury in the Korean environment.  His findings were stark.

Mercury is typically released into the air when fossil fuels containing mercury are burned for power generation. Though South Korean emissions of mercury are about one-tenth that of US emissions (18.5 tons a year compared to 143 tons a year), average blood mercury concentrations in Korean citizens are five times greater than average US concentrations. 

As Dr. Yi presented, one-third of Koreans have blood mercury levels above those deemed safe by US health guidelines – putting them at risk for neurological health effects and neurodegenerative disorders.

What accounts for this looming public health threat? 

Two phenomena combine in Korea to create this potential health disaster: 

1. Koreans consume a lot of seafood (74-95 grams a day, about five times the US average); and

2. Korea is near China.

According to Dr. Yi, China’s annual emissions of mercury are nearly four times greater than the US’s and nearly 30 times greater than Korea’s. 

By tracing mercury concentration changes over time across monitoring sites within Korea, scientists in Seoul were able to implicate Chinese emissions in Korea’s pollutant problems. 

“As our local emissions went down [following new regulations],” he said, “mercury concentrations in our rural and remote stations remained constant.” 

China contributed the most to our high mercury events, he said, noting that more than 60 percent of high mercury events in Seoul, when government air monitors detected unusually acute mercury levels in the air, were the result of air masses carried from China.

Coal combustion in Hunan, metal smelting in Guizhou, and dust storms in the Gobi Desert were all implicated in Korea’s pollution problem.  Meaning what happens in China doesn’t stay in China. 

Lessons like this – an old lesson made new - underscore the importance of international workshops like this one where atmospheric scientists, chemical engineers, and policy experts from around the world wrestled with the very modern problem of global pollution.  Hopefully, the knowledge generated here in Seoul won’t stay here.

Announcing the Indicators in Practice Project

At the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy we are concerned with the state of our planet. We consider ways that national and international governance of our world can be improved to better humanity’s lot - and the lot of the species that coexist (somewhat shakily) with us on this tottering orb. 

One of the more longstanding ways we seek to improve global governance is by creating and publishing, in collaboration with the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University, our biannual ranking of the environmental performance of the world’s nations, the Environmental Performance Index (EPI). In this Index we consider the movement of each nation towards fulfilling their own environmental goals (reduce pollution; create more nature reserves). Those at the top of our list have set ambitious goals for improving environmental health and quality and, largely, they have achieved them. Those at the bottom struggle to set or achieve environmental targets, though many, like Azerbaijan, are quickly improving (earning them a high ranking on our “Trend EPI,” which considers rates of change in performance across years).

Now that the EPI has been around for nearly a decade, we are often asked what the true impact of this effort has been, or could be. 

Is the EPI having an impact on the governance of the world’s resources? 

Do decision makers, stakeholders, and activist agitators look to the scores of their country on the EPI and change the course of their actions? Are new policies implemented? Old ones abandoned?  

This is an ambitious question to answer. As a first step, we have developed the Indicators in Practice Project, a new endeavor to examine the question of the impact of environmental indices, our own EPI and other similar efforts, from a variety of perspectives. 

Through our case studies of government efforts to create and use environmental indicators we have already begun this process. But we are now expanding considerations of environmental performance metrics to include other sectors – businesses and civil society groups in particular.  We will publish an academic review of the literature on indicator impacts, and we will reach out to scholars, practitioners, and policy makers around to world to find and present success stories where strong measurement of environmental quality (matched against goals of environmental protection) have led to good results. 

Another key goal of this effort will be to contextualize the rankings presented in our EPI. Where possible we hope to dig deeper into our best and worst environmental performers -  and ask the question, from a policy and management perspective: what’s driving these scores?

We will revamp the EPI website to include a new Indicators in Practice section, coming soon. And check back often for case studies and discussions of how environmental performance metrics are being used across the world to drive real, measureable changes in the governance of our planet.

Aaron Reuben is a research assistant at the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy, where he studies the policy impacts of environmental health indicators. He holds a Masters of Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Yale environmental journal, SAGE Magazine.

“Academic Performance Index” Ranks YCELP Faculty

For more than a decade The Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) has focused on developing and improving quantitative environmental performance measurement in order to provide a tool for nations to judge the effects of their environmental policy. As the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) has evolved and improved, the profile and proliferation of quantitative performance measurement in other fields have also grown. The margins of this growth is being partially captured in an ongoing YCELP project titled “Indicators In Practice.” In the meantime, one seemingly unrelated effort at performance measurement has captured our attention.

James C. Phillips and Professor John Yoo, both at the University of California-Berkeley, released a paper this month titled The Cite Stuff: Inventing a Better Law Faculty Relevance Measure. Their method attempts, as they say, “to provide a quantitative, albeit imperfect, measure of intellectual impact and productivity” based on “the number of times a scholar has been cited by his peers.” The paper not only presents a ranking for select faculty across the United States, it also breaks down the data into discrete fields, presenting the most cited faculty in a given area of law.

YCELP, of course, is inherently interested in understanding the most impactful environmental law faculty in the United States. YCELP is also inherently interested in having a sense of the diverse ways that others are using quantitative performance measurement. But this particular ranking offers something even more deserving of our attention. (So please forgive me for burying the lede, but we didn’t want to seem too proud).

Professor Dan Esty (YCELP Director on leave) and Professor Doug Kysar (interim Director of YCELP) were ranked as the two most cited faculty in the field of environmental law.  This is an impressive recognition that speaks highly of the work of both professors and the efforts of YCELP to promote that work.

It is worth pointing out that many excellent professors who frequently publish in the field of environmental law were categorized in other fields such as administrative law or public law. Were these professors, such as Richard Revesz, Richard Stewart and Jody Freeman (categorized in administrative law) or Dan Farber (in public law) included instead in environmental law, the rankings would be different.

Any ranking will have certain limitations. The Environmental Performance Index, for example, is limited by the availability, quality and consistency of national environmental data. The Phillips and Yoo “Academic Performance Index” (as I’ve dubbed it) is limited by the necessarily subjective nature of categorizing faculty and selecting proxies for academic impact, productivity or, finally, quality. Ultimately though, the purpose of quantitative performance measurement is not the static ranking that it can create, but the verified improvement or tangible results of investment that those rankings can demonstrate.

The 2012 EPI included a pilot Trend EPI, highlighting both environmental improvement and decline across the globe and creating a starting point for policymakers to explore how real policy has impacted a country’s performance. Phillips and Yoo likewise make clear that “[o]ne of the values of data is to assist one in making decisions.” In the case of the Academic Performance Index the decisions relate not to national environmental policy but to law school hiring decisions. 

The meaning of the new academic study is indeed nuanced, but the benefit of having such as study, as with the EPI, is significant. As Phillips and Yoo explain, quantitative measurement is “important in a profession that seeks not to collect knowledge for future generations like medieval monks, but desires to have an impact on the world now.”

Rio+20 rejects notion of ‘planetary boundaries’ - are there consequences for the EPI?

In the September 2009 edition of Nature, Rockstöm and colleagues proposeda range of essential Earth-system processes and their biophysical thresholds, or ‘planetary boundaries’, that, if exceeded, could lead to catastrophic environmental changes. Earlier this year, the planetary boundaries concept was accepted into the ‘Zero Draft’ of the Rio+20 conference as an essential element in negotiations toward setting environmentally related goals. However, following heavy scientific criticism, the concept was excluded from the Summit’s final statement in June.

The dismissal of planetary boundaries from the final Rio+20 text provides some implications for other environmental metric projects, including our work with the Environmental Performance Index (EPI). Here we address the arguments posed against planetary boundaries, which were recently reviewed by the staff at the Breakthrough Institute. Over the last decade we have incorporated many of these views into the EPI projects, and now we would like to offer some insight into our lessons learned. These experiences will be among the many we present in the upcoming release of our new “how-to” manual on developing environmental performance indices.

A huge challenge for many environmental metric projects is defining the goals and targets of the indicators they present. One of the major arguments from scientists is that planetary boundaries, or biophysical thresholds, are set subjectively, and humans, not ecological systems, determine the question, “How much is too much?” Research has shown that there are limits to an ecosystem’s capacity to absorb human impacts, and this understanding must be applied when defining a threshold or target. For example, we can only divert so much river water for irrigation before a river runs dry, and a plant can only take up so much nitrogen before the excess is washed away during a rainstorm.

Throughout our experience with the EPI, we have carefully considered setting limits and boundaries – constraints that may be viewed as subjective. We generally first looked toward global treaties or universally accepted goals for our indicator targets.  We also obtained feedback from experts through discussions of existing data and policy needs, and we chose targets based on that guidance. While the targets of our index are not thresholds per se, they do allow countries to compare their performance toward the overall EPI goal of global improvement while providing data-driven support for policymaking.

Another major challenge for environmental metric projects is comparability between the types of issues they present. Scientists argue against the attempts of the planetary boundaries concept to compare local and global issues collectively. Is it adequate to compare a global issue, such as climate change, with more local issues, such as biodiversity, water, land and fertilizer? For a planet-wide standard, this may be a hard argument to win because many of the processes presented in these boundaries are not static around the world, and vulnerability to changes in these processes may vary geographically. But these are problems that should be examined everywhere, and it is important to consider what geographical scope is necessary for adequate comparability and applicability of a given project.

Several concepts of environmental change attempt to integrate costs and benefits into a framework, which ultimately is a decision that must be made with regards to a project’s objectives and metrics (e.g., examining human influence on environmental change or measuring progress toward a policy-defined environmental objective). Many times, changes in the environment with respect to human influence are often seen as negative. The authors at the Breakthrough Institute frame this as a problem with planetary boundaries – that they only measure environmental change as negative, and it is impossible for progression toward these boundaries to be positive. They argue that humans have benefited from many of these changes, and any framework attempting to measure environmental change must acknowledge these trade-offs.

The planetary boundaries framework also addresses ethics within science – arbitrarily setting numbers that “reflect preferred outcomes.” The planetary boundaries concept failed to make an explicit connection between particular outcomes and values. Without clarification of meanings and trade-offs between numbers, these thresholds suggest “what is” or “what ought to be,” therefore hindering the transparency of the project’s ethical commitments.

The EPI team takes great care in selecting appropriate targets that are transparent, supported by data, and globally comparable. The EPI is not trying to answer the question of ”how much is too much” because this is only a question that can be answered with human subjectivity (e.g., zero human impact is not possible without ceasing all economic activity, and any goal above zero impact would be determined by individual notions of how much harm is acceptable). Rather, we are hoping to provide a useful and transparent measurement of performance toward a specified policy goal using unbiased judgment and expert reasoning.

The arguments against the planetary boundaries framework have offered our team a chance to reflect on the lessons we’ve learned in our environmental performance measurement work over the years. Data-driven research is necessary for sound policymaking, and the failure to incorporate planetary boundaries into the final Rio+20 text has important implications for environmental measurement projects, especially with regards to measuring change, establishing limits or targets, comparability, trade-offs, and transparency.

Laura Johnson is a master's student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, where she is focusing on biogeochemistry and pollution analysis of aquatic systems. She is interested in the science and policy of environmental issues and their impacts on human health and welfare.

Towards a China EPI - the first step in measuring environmental progress in China

A research team led by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy (YCELP) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University completed in late 2011 the first steps in a large-scale effort to track progress in the governance and management of China’s environment.[1] The effort, published in the report Towards a China Environmental Performance Index, proposed a framework for aggregating diverse environmental health and ecosystem impact data from across China’s 31 provinces, and for comparing these data to the national and subnational environmental policy goals of the Chinese government.

“Given its burgeoning economic growth, its rapidly expanding industries, large population, and growing consumer class, many in the environmental field have an intense interest in how China will address its environmental problems,” Alex de Sherbinin, one of the study’s authors from CEISIN, noted in an introduction to the report. He called the study’s framework a “first cut at assessing China’s environmental management and performance at the provincial level.” 

The project, which stopped short of creating a final environmental index (largely because of current gaps in the quality and availability of environmental data, as well as a lack of clear Chinese environmental policy goals for 13 out of the 32 indicators) has paved the way for a longer-term effort to monitor the progress of China toward a cleaner environment and more sustainable future.

And the timing couldn’t better. The last few years have seen China emerge as a world cultural leader, most famously epitomized in its extravagant hosting of the 2008 summer Olympics; an economic leader, with the world’s second largest economy; and, as of 2007, a leading emitter of global greenhouse gases.[2] On a national level, addressing the growing impacts of a degrading environment has become a new priority for the Chinese government and an increasingly vocal middle class. Last fall’s popular protests over poor air pollution monitoring and reporting in Beijing are a salient example from this growing trend. 

The proposed China EPI, which will act as a blueprint for an index that the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection is currently working towards, aggregates environmental data across 33 indicators in 12 environmental policy categories, including air pollution, water quality, climate change, biodiversity, agriculture, and forestry.

“Globally, the move toward a more data-driven empirical approach to environmental protection promises to better enable policymakers to spot problems, track trends, highlight policy successes and failures, identify best practices, and optimize the gains from investments in environmental protection,” the study authors write. The proposed China EPI, based in part on the research team’s experience producing the global Environmental Performance Index (EPI), provides a scaffolding for just such an approach.

“China, like many countries, has employed performance metrics in areas such as economic, educational, and social policy,” the authors write. “It is natural to extend this practice to the environmental sphere.”

Next Steps – a growing Chinese effort 

In response to the foundational work of the framework China EPI, Chinese academics and government and civil society leaders are now building the resources necessary for a final China EPI. This work will largely seek to address the data gaps and ambiguity of policy goals identified by the Yale and Columbia team as critical impediments to understanding China’s environmental performance at the province level. 

The Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning has shared with YCELP updates on a number of new governmental and non-governmental efforts to accomplish this task. These include:

-  Efforts to increase government environmental performance assessments.

The Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection is proposing a China Environmental Performance Assessment System for implementation of the“12^th Five-Year Plan,” which establishes policy goals and governs development programs for China from 2011-2015, and plans to increase the number and diversity of environmental health indicators measured at the provincial level.[3]

-  Efforts to monitor the impact of Chinese corporations on the environment.

Chinese researchers, in cooperation with the government of Sweden, are developing a corporate environmental performance assessment indicator system, which will soon focus on 100 listed firms for a pilot study.

-  Efforts to track and improve the quality of life in China’s large cities.

The Chinese government is cooperating with the United Nations Environment Program to develop a China Pollution Reduction Performance Assessment research program, which will soon evaluate the pollution reduction performance of four pilot Chinese cities. There are, additionally, growing civil society and quasi-governmental programs seeking to assess the environmental quality of China’s cities, including the Asian Development Bank’s “China Environmental Livable Index of Cities,” the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)’s Asian Green Cities Index, and The People's Republic of China Urban Knowledge Hub.

For more information see:

- The YCELP and CEISIN report, Towards a China Environmental Performance Index, available here: http://envirocenter.research.yale.edu/files/China-EPI-Report.pdf

- An introduction to the China EPI, China’s Long March Towards Better Environmental Conditions, available here: http://environment.yale.edu/envirocenter/post/chinas-long-march-towards-better-environmental-conditions/

- The People’s Republic of China Urban Resources Hub, available here: http://www2.adb.org/Projects/PRC-Urban-Knowledge/default.asp

Aaron Reuben is a research assistant at the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy, where he studies the policy impacts of environmental health indicators. He holds a Masters of Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Yale environmental journal, SAGE Magazine.

Dispatch from Rio: Incorporating ‘Sustainability’ into the Human Development Index

Yale, Columbia Partner with AIEES on Air Quality Initiative

Air pollution is a critical concern for both human health and ecosystems and has become a high-priority environmental issue. Concentrations of air pollutants, such as particulate matter (PM), ozone, and toxic chemicals (mercury, persistent organic pollutants, and lead), are contributing to increased rates of asthma, lung and cardiovascular disease, and cancer. The World Health Organization estimatesthat in 2004, slightly less than one million disability-adjusted life years were lost due to outdoor air pollution.

Policy interventions, such as the Clean Air Act in the United States and the Clean Air Directive in Europe, have helped, but in other parts of the world (Asia in particular), air pollution is becoming an increasingly severe problem due to rapid industrial and urban growth.

Policymakers and governments need timely, accurate information to develop and implement air pollution abatement and control policies, but existing datasets for air pollutant emissions are either incomplete or incomparable among countries and in a global context. This lack of comparability is largely due to the variation in air quality monitoring systems between countries, which often produce fundamentally dissimilar data. Some countries do not have adequate monitoring stations or networks to produce representative data samples. In other cases, countries may lack the technical capacity to measure some critical air pollutants, which results in data gaps and leaves policymakers unable to develop relevant global indicators and indices.

One way scientists have tried to address such shortcomings is by using models to estimate emission concentrations, predict future growth, and simulate transport of pollutants across national boundaries. At the most fundamental level these models are based on algorithms -- not ambient empirical data – which results in some inherent degree of uncertainty. Previous editions of the Environmental Performance Index (EPI)have relied on a combination of reported air quality statistics from international organizations, such as the World Bank, and some modeled data for outdoor air pollution indicators, but the 2012 EPI abandoned both sources and opted instead to use a estimation of fine particulate matter concentrations (PM 2.5)derived from the MODISsatellite. While not perfect, these country-level PM 2.5 estimations were consistently calculated for each country, providing a basis for comparing long-term average exposures to a pollutant that is known to have acute human health effects.

To address these persistent data challenges in global air quality, the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University, are teaming up with the Asian Institute for Energy and Environmental Sustainability (AIEES) to launch a new initiative, “Towards a next generation of air quality monitoring.”

The resulting report will include a series of background papers that will each focus on a critical pollutant (i.e. ozone) or group of pollutants (i.e. persistent organic pollutants or POPs), as well as a policy blueprint with recommendations for policymakers on investments and improvements in air quality monitoring, data, and indicators. The report also aims to bring the scientific and policy communities together to provide clear direction for both groups. First, for scientists, it will provide guidance on short-term actions related to monitoring and modeling as well as longer-term challenges. Secondly, for decisionmakers, the report will provide targeted activities at different levels – regional, national, global – also divided into short- and longer-term categories.

The project launched in May, and AIEES will host a workshop in Seoul, South Korea, in October that will convene scientists and policymakers to review the draft report, which will be released in early 2013.