“Why should people who cannot afford a car breathe in the dirt of the ones who can?” – why emission reduc-tion would require real innovative thinking and acting and who breaths what.

Lixin Fu, Professor and Director of Air Pollution Research, Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, P. R. China

When reading about the huge potential for the automotive industry in China, but also about the unsatisfying sales figures of the large automotive corporations, we were not expecting to see too many cars in Beijing’s wide streets. However, this is far from reality; there was almost no interview partner in the city that we could reach without standing in traffic jams - any time of the day. Public transport is not very well developed and subway runs only in a very small inner circle of the town - by far not suf-ficient to cover the growing population’s needs.
Therefore, we were very curious to hear from Prof. Lixin Fu, a specialist on traffic-based air pollution and advisor to the Chinese government in this area, about the current situation. When he told us that there are currently 2.4 million cars on Beijing’s roads, a number increasing 15% annually and representing 1/10 of the Chinese car market, we realized how big the issue is. Thanks to rigorous im-provements in Chinese legislation (significant reductions of emission standards per car), the overall degree of air pol-lution did at least not increase further during the last few years, but, with the strongly rising number of new cars, it is almost impossible to reduce it. Hopefully Mr. Fu can convince more people to consider innovative alternative models to urban mobility.

Enjoy reading part of what we discussed with Lixin Fu in the selected statements below and you may be able to read more in our book “MyImpact”.

Lixin Fu’s selected quotations:
“An innovative technology in the environmental area is developed as soon as there is a regulation that requires it. As long as there is not regulatory pressure, no enter-prise will invest in a new technology.”

“I focus on researching and developing emission models so that appropriate policy can be designed. We model pollu-tion levels in cities, regions or smaller areas and can also run forecasts of those.”

“Why should people who cannot afford a car breathe the dirt of the ones who can? Why don’t we clean it up?”

“I guess my main motivation is the interest in integrated issues. I like to link things together and that’s what is necessary in the whole traffic, emission and mobility field.”

“When I started in the area in the early 90ies, environ-ment was a new topic in China with new issues and very few experts. It was a good time to get involved. Especi-ally the progress at the beginning was very encouraging.”

“My personal dream would be to create an environment in Beijing where people, and of course I, could live close to nature, to grass and water. Right now in Beijing, it is bad air and a lot of construction. I don’t think that anybody likes to live in concrete.”

Some background on Lixin Fu:
Lixin Fu was born and grew up in the Hunan province of China. At the age of 16 he came to Beijing to study physics at the Tsinghua University with a focus on liquid mechanics. He spent a year at the Danish Environmental Re-search Insitute near Copenhagen and researched in Vienna and Hong Kong.
In 1989, Lixin Fu received his mas-ter degree in architectural physics, focusing on urban in-dustry and noise. A position with the ministry followed in the area of noise control, which did not seem like a pres-sing enough issue so that Lixin Fu went back to teach and work on his PhD at the Tsinghua University in 1992.
One of his early environmental projects was a research assignment with the national environmental agency and the World Bank in 1994, when the vehicular pollution is-sues started coming up in China. Since then he has done many projects and a lot of research, lately focusing on modeling and forecasting of traffic emissions as base for government activities.

Some background on Tsinghua University:
Situated on several former royal gardens of the Qing Dynasty, surrounded by a few historical sites in northwest Beijing, is the campus of Tsinghua Uni-versity. It was estab-lished in 1911. The uni-versity currently has over 7,100 faculty and staff, with over 900 full professors and 1,200 associate professors, including 24 members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and 24 members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Presently, Tsinghua has over 20,000 students, including 12,000 undergraduates, 6,200 master's degrees candida-tes and 2,800 doctoral candidates.
The department of Environmental Science and Engineering is ranked number one in Environmental Research and Edu-cation in China and is the only one listed by the State Council as the national key base for Environmental re-search and education. The Department is also ranked as the second in the overall technical assessment of all the 43 departments of the University. It is well known for its leading edge research and a respected advisor for the Chinese Government in many areas.

If you would like to engage with the work of Lixin Fu or get to know more about Tsinghua University please visit www.tsinghua.edu.cn,
or, for more specific opportunities, contact joanna.stefanska@myimpact.ch or wolfgang.hafenmayer@myimpact.ch directly.