An Integrated Assessment of Emissions, Air Quality, Economic, and Health Impacts of Transport Policies in China

The goal of this project is to perform a comparison of policy options for reducing transportation emissions in China and to communicate our results to policymakers through an ongoing and interactive process over the course of the project. The policy comparison will be accomplished in four research tasks: 1) to introduce a detailed description of China’s transport sector in a national energy model of China, 2) to develop a new emissions inventory for China focused on the transport sector detail and project possible future emissions of NOx, CO, VOCs, BC, and OC under reference and policy scenarios, 3) to identify regional air quality impacts for a subset of scenarios using a state-of-the-art regional chemical transport model, and 4) to analyze the impact of various policy designs on transport emissions, the economy, and human health. The portion of the research conducted at MIT will involve 1) developing a detailed representation of vehicle transportation activities (both passenger and freight vehicle use) in an energy-economic model of the Chinese economy, 2) simulating in the model policy constraints on vehicle ownership, fuel quality, and emissions using this model, and 3) implementing a module in the model to quantify the health effects of air pollution exposure.