International Climate Policy

China's urban population surpassed its rural population historically in 2011, and about 300 million more people will move from rural to urban area, that’s almost the total population of the US! In the years to come, cities in China will face major challenges as their rapidly increasing population's burden already crowded infrastructure systems and exacerbate environmental and climate change issues, threatening public health and quality of life. If China, the world's top energy consumer, and CO2 emitter, can move toward a low carbon economy will have big implications for the global energy and climate policy: a series of comprehensive economic reform, development, and transformation for a low carbon future. My research with the China Energy Group at LBL (Dr. Nan Zhou, Lynn Price, David Fridley, Christopher Williams, LU Hongyou, Nina Khanna, HONG Lixuan, Cecilia Fino-Chen, Dr. Stephanie Ohshita) created a low carbon eco-city indicator system and an ELITE Cities tool to help policymakers to define a low carbon city, evaluate and compare with international best practices. I work with Prof. C.S. Kiang at the Sustainable Development Technology Foundation to promote U.S. - China cooperation on low carbon cities. I also worked with RAEL CoolClimate program (Chris Jones and Dr. Daniel Kammen) to study the carbon footprint calculations for cities, communities, and companies. We need to know where are the emissions come from and what are the potentials before we can manage global carbon emissions.

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