At the annual meeting of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation on 3 and 4 June, Germany’s Federal President Joachim Gauck received more than 570 international scientists in Schloss Bellevue – among them IASS Fellow Dr Bing Xue. At the opening reception, a range of issues were covered from researchers’ daily routines to the ethics of science. In his speech, Joachim Gauck underlined how important it is that researchers from different disciplines and countries come together to promote freedom and spur prosperity, technical innovation and good ethical standards. Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation allows more than 2 000 researchers from all over the world to spend time researching in Germany. The foundation maintains a network of well over 26 000 Humboldtians from all disciplines in more than 140 countries worldwide – including 50 Nobel Prize winners.
Humboldt Research Fellow Dr Xue, who joined the IASS platform “Enabling Technologies for Sustainability” (ETS) in January 2014, is currently working on a co-benefit approach to climate change at city scale focussed on the industrial city of Shenyang in Northeast China. The co-benefit approach refers to the development and implementation of policies and strategies that simultaneously contribute to tackling climate change and solving local environmental and developmental problems. Although political rhetoric may at times recognize the concept of co-benefits, where the issues of climate change, air quality and energy supply are intertwined, in practice policies on climate change, air quality and energy supply often compete against each other.
Nowadays, roughly half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. This number is projected to reach 60 per cent by 2030. Thus cities consume the bulk of the energy produced worldwide – between 60 and 80 per cent – and account for roughly the same share of global CO2 emissions. Despite growing efforts to introduce urban management practices and systems, the environmental quality of cities in most developing countries such as China remains unsatisfactory and is even worsening. This applies to both local and global environmental problems. Given China’s rapid urbanisation, it is necessary to develop a deeper appreciation of the multiple and far-reaching benefits of green growth and, in particular, the potential of climate change mitigation policy to advance society’s sustainability objectives, such as growth in renewable energies. Dr Xue’s research seeks to measure the benefits of greenhouse gas emission reduction for local pollutant reduction and vice versa. His project is expected to increase our understanding of how we can develop an evaluation tool to assess the effectiveness of urban co-benefits.
Before he joined the IASS, Dr Xue was an associate professor at the Institute for Applied Ecology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
