• Energy Research

China, with its growing population and economic development, faces increasing risks to health from climate change, but also opportunities to address these risks and protect health for generations to come. Without a timely and adequate response, climate change will impact lives and livelihoods at an accelerated rate. In 2020, the Lancet Countdown Regional Centre in Asia, led by Tsinghua University, built on the work of the global Lancet Countdown and began its assessment of the health profile of climate change in China with the aim of triggering rapid and health-responsive actions.This 2021 report is the first annual update, presenting 25 indicators within five domains: climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerability; adaptation, planning, and resilience for health; mitigation actions and health co-benefits; economics and finance; and public and political engagement. The report represents the contributions of 88 experts from 25 leading institutions in, and outside of, China. From 2020 to 2021, five new indicators have been added and methods have been improved for many indicators. Where possible, the indicator results are presented at national and provincial levels to facilitate local understanding and policy making. In a year marked by COVID-19, this report also endeavours to reflect on China's pathway for a green recovery, ensuring it aligns with the carbon neutrality goal, for the health of the current and future generations.

As China’s population ages rapidly, the health risks associated with a changing climate are becoming more threatening. The 2022 China report of the Lancet Countdown, led by Tsinghua University with the contributions of 73 experts from 23 leading global institutions, tracks progress in climate change and health in China through 27 indicators across five domains: (1) Climate change impacts, exposure, and vulnerability; (2) adaptation, planning, and resilience for health; (3) mitigation actions and health co-benefits; (4) economics and finance; and (5) public and political engagement. This report is the third China Lancet Countdown report, paying particular attention to the impacts on the elderly and highlighting the urgency of taking action. We selected the most urgent and relevant indicators to complete a policy brief that provides a better understanding of recent progress on climate change and health in China. We found heat-related health impacts increased from 2020 to 2021, increasing heat-related mortality, reducing labour capacity, and undermining the capacity to partake in physical activity due to rising temperature. In addition, exposure to wildfire, extreme drought, and extreme rainfall also increased in different regions across China. In 2021, compared with the 1986–2005 average, people in China had an average of 7.85 more heatwave days (which led to an extra 13185 heatwave-related deaths), and a loss of 0.67 more hours of safe outdoor physical exercise per day. The rising temperature also caused the annual average exposure to wildfire to increase by 60.0% between 2017–2021 compared with the 2001–2005 average. Meanwhile, the engagement on health and climate issues from individuals, scholars, and public sectors continues to grow rapidly. From 2020 to 2021, the number of climate-related articles and documents on the official websites of four Chinese Government departments grew by 1.83 times, and the number of climate-and-health-related articles and documents grew by 3.7 times. However, older populations received marginal attention on this issue in media coverage, although they are more vulnerable to the health threats of climate change than younger populations. In most provinces, people aged 65 years and older are facing higher health risks of climate change than the general population. In addition, we found that the inputs and attention to adaptation are still insufficient compared with the increasing health risks posed by climate change. Based on the findings, the following recommendations are made to protect climate change-related health risks: (1) Increasing adaptation across governmental departments and accelerating investment in climate resilience. Adaptation across governmental departments and investment in climate resilience must be substantially increased to protect the health of Chinese populations. (2) Developing a stand-alone Health National Climate Adaptation Plan. Leaders must strengthen the response of local efforts to national plans, for example, by establishing a nationwide heat and cold and health early warning system with regional characteristics. (3) Prioritise climate change in health policies, with a focus on the wellbeing of vulnerable populations. Leaders should include climate change health impact prevention and treatment as one of the key responsibilities of the new National Bureau of Disease Control and Prevention. (4) Accelerating coal reduction and integrating health considerations into China’s pathway to carbon neutrality. Leaders must strictly control the capacity of coal-fired power generation and accelerate the pace of coal reduction (especially in the household sector). (5) Promoting renewable energy generation and consumption by redirecting fossil fuel subsidies to China’s low-carbon economy. Leaders should keep encouraging renewable energy generation and consumption.

Passengers significantly affect airport terminal energy consumption and indoor environmental quality. Accurate passenger forecasting provides important insights for airport terminals to optimize their operation and management. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly increased the uncertainty in airport passenger since 2020. There are insufficient studies to investigate which pandemic-related variables should be considered in forecasting airport passenger trends under the impact of COVID-19 outbreaks. In this study, the interrelationship between COVID-19 pandemic trends and passenger traffic at a major airport terminal in China was analyzed on a day-by-day basis. During COVID-19 outbreaks, three stages of passenger change were identified and characterized, i.e., the decline stage, the stabilization stage, and the recovery stage. A typical “sudden drop and slow recovery” pattern of passenger traffic was identified. A LightGBM model including pandemic variables was developed to forecast short-term daily passenger traffic at the airport terminal. The SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) values was used to quantify the contribution of input pandemic variables. Results indicated the inclusion of pandemic variables reduced the model error by 27.7% compared to a baseline model. The cumulative numbers of COVID-19 cases in previous weeks were found to be stronger predictors of future passenger traffic than daily COVID-19 cases in the most recent week. In addition, the impact of pandemic control policies and passengers' travel behavior was discussed. Our empirical findings provide important implications for airport terminal operations in response to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic.

With growing health risks from climate change and a trend of increasing carbon emissions from coal, it is time for China to take action. The rising frequency and severity of extreme weather events in China, such as record-high temperatures, low rainfall, severe droughts, and floods in many regions (along with the compound and ripple effects of these events on human health) have underlined the urgent need for health-centred climate action. The rebound in the country's coal consumption observed in 2022 reflected the great challenge faced by China in terms of its coal phase-down, over-riding the country's gains in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Timely and adequate responses will not only reduce or avoid the impacts of climate-related health hazards but can also protect essential infrastructures from disruptions caused by extreme weather. Health and climate change are inextricably linked, necessitating a high prioritisation of health in adaptation and mitigation efforts. The 2023 China report of the Lancet Countdown continues to track progress on health and climate change in China, while now also attributing the health risks of climate change to human activities and providing examples of feasible and effective climate solutions. This fourth iteration of the China report was spearheaded by the Lancet Countdown regional centre in Asia, based at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Progress is monitored across 28 indicators in five domains: from climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerability (section 1); to the different elements of action, including adaption (section 2) and mitigation, and their health implications (section 3); to economics and finance (section 4); and public and political engagement (section 5). This report was compiled with the contribution of 76 experts from 26 institutions both within and outside of China. The impending global stocktake at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28), the UN initiative on early warning systems (which ...

AbstractAn effective way to reduce the energy consumption of a building is to optimize the control strategy for the HVAC system. Load prediction is suggested and used to match the supply and demand for air conditioning and achieve energy savings. However, the gap between load prediction models and real-time optimal control of HVAC systems still exists. Hence, this paper proposed an optimization method for dynamically determining the best setpoints of chillers and chilled water pumps under a specific load. The energy consumption model of each equipment in the centralized cooling station is established and validated using the operational data. Then an optimization problem is defined to find the optimal setpoints for each equipment under certain load, to realize the lowest energy consumption. To verify the validity of the proposed method, a period of real operational data in an office park is used. The proposed method is applied on one centralized cooling station in the office park and results in an 4% lower overall energy consumption than the existing intelligent control strategies in the park. This method provides feasible directions and reference for realizing overall optimal control of the whole HVAC system in the future.

Abstract In order to resolve the contradiction between the lack of building energy data and the need of more detailed information about energy performance, this paper presents a simplified building energy performance diagnosis method which can assess the energy performance from building level to system level with only limited information. Based on multiple-parameter regression between the whole building energy bills and outdoor weather data, the proposed diagnosis method uses the regression coefficients to identify the energy use of main systems (i.e., lighting-plug system and cooling/heating system), as well as other detailed information about physical properties of the building and cooling/heating system (i.e., cooling or heating load, the operation of cooling/heating system and the efficiency of cooling/heating system). One case study was conducted in an office building in China to test the application of this diagnosis method. In addition, the regression result of simulated energy consumption served as benchmark data to further diagnose the performance gap between the operation stage and the design stage and help locate the poor performance and key points of energy-saving. Finally, all diagnosis results have been verified by the performance data from advanced energy consumption monitoring system together with field surveys and measurements.

Abstract The purpose of this study was to explore how the human body adapts to an environment as the temperature changes, and to describe the relationship between the objective skin temperature and subjective thermal evaluation. The influence of short-term thermal experience, which based on minutes and hours scale, could be considered on the prediction of thermal sensation. Usually, the indoor temperature set point is close to neutral, in which state the heat transfer between environment and human body is at a low level. Therefore, we mainly focused on the changes from non-neutral to neutral, to observe the effects of thermal experience in neutral environment. A chamber experiment was conducted with 20 subjects and used five conditions. The control group was maintained at 26 °C. The other conditions consisted of two phases in which subjects were exposed to a hot or cold temperature for a period of time and then go into a 26 °C room, which is considered a neutral environment. We measured the skin temperature on the chest, upper arm, and lower limb. The subjects were asked to complete thermal evaluation questionnaires about thermal sensation, thermal comfort, and thermal acceptance. The skin temperature of subjects varied for the different conditions. We found that even if a poor thermal environment was improved slightly, the thermal satisfaction of subjects increased significantly. This study describes two methods for the prediction of thermal sensation, and the results contribute to our understanding of the mechanism of adaptive thermal comfort.