The China Project's economists, engineers, atmospheric scientists, and health scientists at both Harvard and Tsinghua are now working on an interdisciplinary breakthrough: linking the economics-engineering-health framework developed in Clearing the Air with the Project's GEOS-Chem atmospheric model of China, tested against observations by satellite and ground stations.

This long-intended Project integration is possible due to recent advances in the resolution of national emission inventories developed by Tsinghua researchers (including  PhD dissertations by Zhao (2008) and Lei (2008), now both Project post-docs). The improved spatial and sector resolution makes the linking of a sector-based economic model with a spatially-resolved atmospheric model feasible.

The result will be a major advance in understanding the full atmospheric (and related) effects of emission control and energy policies shaping the Chinese economy. This model integration will allow the team to more accurately quantify the effects of complex secondary pollutants like ozone and sulfates on public health, agricultural productivity, and the economy, and potentially of black carbon and sulfates on radiative forcing.

The multi-disciplinary team is currently funded to assess two policies using the newly comprehensive framework:

• A carbon tax, in which avoided local pollution and health damages are a co-benefit of GHG control; and
• The ongoing sulfur control measures of the 11th Five Year Plan (2006-2010), in which effects on carbon emissions are a co-benefit of local pollution control.

Preliminary results are anticipated in summer of 2009, and peer-reviewed publication in 2010.

The team is considering a wide range of policies, funding allowing, that could soon be evaluated using the comprehensive framework:

• a range of carbon tax levels;
• anticipated NOx controls in the 12th Five Year Plan (2011-2015);
• anticipated energy efficiency policies in the 12th FYP;
• renewable energy policies and strategies;
• black carbon control;

and others.

This extended collaboration was seed-funded by the Harvard China Fund and is now generously supported by a grant from the China Sustainable Energy Program of the Energy Foundation, and a Harvard fund for student and post-doctoral fellowships.

The team is also preparing to broaden the collaboration further, to draw in additional past and current research capacities separately developed by the China Project, in particular:

• A regional, bottom-up, technology choice model of the Chinese electric power sector originally developed by Murray (1996) and Murray and Rogers (1998), later reconciled with the Project's economic model by Cao (2007), and now gradually being updated for current conditions; and
• Wind (and solar) electric power potentials for China, assessed using NASA assimilated meteorological datasets (McElroy et al. 2009).