By Jon Luoma, from the Fall 2008 issue of Environment: Yale magazine. You may download a PDF of this article as it originally appeared in the magazine.

In the weeks leading up to the pageantry and athletic triumph of the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing, one troubling image predominated: air so polluted it looked like cumulonimbus had descended on the city. Thanks to a temporary government shutdown of some regional industries, along with severe restrictions on driving, air pollution decreased and cleaner skies arrived in time for the Games in August. But the pre-Olympic images remain as reminders of what James Fallows, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, has called “the environmental damage that is the most shocking side effect of China’s economic miracle.”

Illustration: James Yang

To help address the troubling environmental downside of China’s economic boom, an anonymous donor has awarded Yale a $2 million dollar gift to help create an Asia Environment Fund at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES). The fund will support research, policy, exchange and outreach efforts aimed at some of China’s most pressing environmental problems. At the urgent center of that focus will be the crisis that is not only China’s, or Asia’s, but the entire world’s–global warming.

“The enormous expansion of the human enterprise in Asia has brought us to the threshold of a new era in which environmental management must quickly emerge as a top priority of governments and citizens everywhere,” said F&ES Dean Gus Speth. “The importance of focusing extensively on environmental issues as they relate to China cannot be overstated, both for the health of the Chinese people and the health of the planet.”

In 2008, China moved past the United States as the single-largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world, with coal consumption there soaring at a rate of 20 percent per year and reports of new coal-fired power plants going up at a rate of one every week or two. But power plant emissions are only a piece of a larger and still incompletely understood puzzle about the best way to address China’s contribution to global warming.

“Farming is the single most important land use type in China, and it plays a huge role in the future trajectory of the Chinese greenhouse gas portfolio,” says Xuhui Lee, professor of meteorology at F&ES.

With support from the fund, Lee’s research team will expand studies aimed at finding the best ways to minimize climate change while sustaining food production. They will compare, for example, greenhouse gas emissions from traditional farming practices and those from industrialized approaches. 

According to Lee, traditional ecological field studies–sampling soils and vegetation–will provide some answers. But although these methods can detect changes over longer periods of time–months or years–they cannot measure responses over shorter time frames, such as weeks or days or an event as brief as a rain shower. So Lee and his colleagues are deploying arrays of state-of-the art instruments, including tunable diode laser analyzers. These devices can measure short-term changes not only in carbon dioxide, but also in methane and nitrous oxide, which are also greenhouse gases. The researchers have already deployed their analyzer arrays in fields of wheat, maize, cotton and soybeans on the plains of northern China, and they plan to add at least one additional array on a rice paddy, an agricultural
landscape vital to Asian agriculture.

Marian Chertow, Ph.D. ’00, associate professor of industrial environmental management, is researching energy and resource use and exchange among companies located in large Chinese industrial parks. This work focuses on how diverse industries can better use and exchange energy, raw materials and water and process wastes in ways that provide both financial and environmental benefits. For instance, a refinery’s sulfur waste might become raw material for an agricultural company’s fertilizer. Or waste heat from a power plant might provide space heating for a nearby factory. Ideally, an entire network of industries can be linked for optimal benefits. The idea could be compared with the symbiosis and other mutual benefits that organisms enjoy in natural ecosystems, notes Chertow.

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change, points out that not only is booming China now the leader in carbon dioxide emissions, booming Asian neighbor India is fourth. Combined, he says, the two nations now generate one quarter of all the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, “a proportion,” he says, “that is only projected to rise.” (Second-place United States, with a smaller population, still holds the dubious title of leader in per capita emissions.)  

And yet, he notes, little is known about public perceptions about global warming among the 2.5 billion people in the two countries, including the degree to which the public understands the great risks–ranging from flooding from rising seas to agricultural damage from drought–that this global problem poses to their own nations. Nor is much known about the degree to which people in the two nations would favor government policies to address the global problem or be willing to make sacrifices themselves. To find answers, the Yale Project on Climate Change plans to collaborate with local pollsters to conduct “large, nationally representative surveys” about global warming in both nations, the first of their kind, says Leiserowitz.

The Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy will be compiling a subnational “Environmental Performance Index” (EPI) specifically tailored for China. Collaborating with Columbia University, the center in 2008 issued the latest international EPI, which ranked the nations of the world based on how they scored on a wide range of environmental protection issues, from the provision of sanitary water to protection of agricultural land and biodiversity. Climate change-related issues constituted 25 percent of the total score. (Of 149 nations ranked, wealthy Switzerland, Norway and Sweden were on top; the African nations of Sierra Leone, Angola and Niger came out at the bottom. The United States was 39th and China was 105th.)

According to Christine Kim, project manager for the EPI, the analysis now under way for China will break down environmental performance province by province. One major thrust is to provide provincial and federal governments with information that can help them tailor environmental policies to fit specific needs.

“Different areas have somewhat different problems and can’t employ the same solutions,” says Kim. For example, she says that air pollution sources can differ widely from region to region. A performance index could guide strategies for allocating resources or for setting suitable air quality policies or emission regulations.

The donors who provided the gift at the core of the Asia Environment Fund said they were motivated in part by Yale’s history of international exchange, education and “catalysis and influence.” They cited the “opportunities for scholarship, learning and debate” in Yale’s World Fellows Program, which brings young leaders from around the globe to the university. In that spirit, Xuhui Lee has developed a lecture series for the current academic year at Yale featuring Chinese environmental experts, who are exploring the environmental ramifications of their nation’s economic boom, with a focus on carbon emissions, as well as on the protection
of biodiversity and natural resources.

The fund has also provided three years of support for an environmental leadership education program that will bring political leaders and local officials to Yale for intensive study of urban planning and development. This project is administered by the Environment and Sustainable Development Leadership Program (ESDLP), a joint venture of F&ES and China’s Tsinghua University.

In terms of public outreach, the new magazine, Yale Environment 360, published online and aimed at an international audience, has been able to expand its coverage of China and Asia as a whole. The Web magazine, which covers the gamut of environmental issues, got off to a rousing start with nearly 1.5 million “hits” in the first 11 weeks after its July 2008 launch.

By early September, the magazine had already published several articles focused on China. Correspondent Christina Larson, who is based part of the year in Beijing, had filed two of four reports focusing on Chinese environmentalists. Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, had authored a detailed opinion piece, “The U.S. and China: Common Ground on Climate,” on why the United States and China must become partners on global warming.

“Several of our articles have already been linked to or cited by Chinese websites and publications,” says Editor Roger Cohn. And he notes that Yale Environment 360 has established an ongoing relationship with the Chinese Web publication China Dialogue, which has republished several Yale Environment 360 pieces in both English and Mandarin.

“We’re commissioning articles written by Chinese journalists as well,” says Cohn. “China Dialogue will be acting as the intermediary, translating the articles into English and handling the journalists’ interactions with editors here at Yale.”

This sort of cooperation with Chinese and other Asian entities permeates the entire array of programs that will benefit from the fund. Chertow’s industrial-symbiosis project, for instance, is being conducting in collaboration with China’s Tsinghua University, National Center for Innovation Research on Circular Economy at Nankai University, as well as the National University of Singapore. The Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning is a key collaborator on the EPI project.

China expert Orville Schell’s Yale Environment 360 commentary on global warming highlights the urgency of just the sort of collaboration the new Asia Environment Fund is spurring. Of the United States and China, he writes: “The consequences of rapidly escalating emissions from both nations are now beginning to be increasingly evident in such phenomena as melting glaciers, changing weather patterns and the loss of Arctic sea ice. Whatever else may divide us, and there is much, we will be unable to escape the consequences of each other’s actions on climate change.”