Report Title: Climate and Environmental Lock-in Effects of Global High-Carbon Infrastructure.

  Speaker: Dr. Tong Dan, University of California, Irvine

  Time: 13:30 ~ 15:05, Monday, November 23, 2020

  Venue:  

Tencent meeting (ID: 38511800485) Tsinghua University Department of Geosciences official Weibo live broadcast

Brief Introduction of the Lecture:

On October 8, 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ℃ (hereinafter referred to as the Report). The report assesses the possible impact of a 1.5 ℃ increase in global average surface temperature and the emission reduction path to achieve the 1.5 ℃ temperature control target, pointing out that the global average surface temperature is now about 1 ℃ higher than the pre-industrial level. There is only 420-580 Gt CO2 emission space (50%-66% confidence interval) left in the world under 5 ℃ temperature control target. At present, more than half of human energy comes from fossil fuels extracted from deep in the earth, and the fossil fuel system has been deeply embedded in society. Economic development is over-dependent on fossil energy, and the existing large number of high-carbon infrastructure in the future carbon emissions (that is, "lock in carbon emissions"). It poses a serious threat to the transformation of low-carbon energy and hinders the process of developing low-carbon economy. At the same time, high-carbon infrastructure is also an important source of major air pollutant emissions, how to achieve the collaborative governance of climate and environment is a major scientific issue of general concern to scientists and environmental policy makers. This report introduces the global high-carbon infrastructure locking carbon effect accounting, change and climate environmental impact from 1998 to 2018, and puts forward the future path of climate and environmental co-governance.

Brief introduction of the presenter:

Tong Dan, PhD, is currently engaged in postdoctoral research at the University of California, Irvine, USA, and graduated from Tsinghua University in January 2018. She has devoted herself to the quantitative characterization of global atmospheric pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the policy analysis of environmental and climate impacts, and her achievements have been published in the world's top journals such as Nature, Nature-Geoscience, Nature-Sustainable Development and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her research results in 2017 “The Health Impact of PM2.5 Transboundary Pollution Implied in Global International Trade” nominated the top 10 scientific advances in China in that year. In 2019, she pointed out that the existing energy facilities in the world pose a serious threat to the 1.5℃ temperature increase target, and the research was included in the 100 studies (ranked 16) of the world’s most public concern. With a series of achievements in the fields of pollution emission characterization, climate change and emission reduction, she was selected as the “35 Science and Technology Innovators under 35” list of MIT Science and Technology Review in China in 2019.