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Departmental Research Seminars
Urban Environments & Climate Change
Via Zoom: link will be provided upon successful registration
Enquiry: geog.event@hku.hk
[ 09:30-10:15 ]
Topic:
Applications of big data on residential properties to provide decision support for decarbonization policies
This talk discusses two related studies that apply big data on residential properties to provide decision support for decarbonization policies. The data include residential property attributes and values in the United States that cover more than 150 million homes in 51 states. First, we use such data to assess the effectiveness of decarbonization policies that provide rebates and low-interest loans to incentivize consumers to adopt heat pumps. Heat pumps offer an energy-efficient way to electrify space heating and thus provide a pathway to achieving cost-effective deep decarbonization of the economy. Second, we estimate the impact of local natural gas (methane) leakages on housing prices. Methane is an important greenhouse gas. Our results provide the estimates of willingness-to-pay for repairing gas leakages, which is important for policymakers to evaluate any repair programs.
Speaker:
Dr. Yueming (Lucy) QIU
Associate Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland College Park, United States
Dr. Yueming (Lucy) QIU is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at University of Maryland College Park. Her research group focuses on using big data with quasi-experimental and experimental methods to answer empirical questions related to the interactions among consumer behaviours, energy technologies, and incentives. Her research projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, Department of Defence, Electric Power Research Institute, and Water Research Foundation. Dr. Qiu received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and B.S. from Tsinghua University. She has published in leading journals including Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, and Nature Communications.
[ 10:45-11:30 ]
Topic:
Network resilience under climate change
Sea level rise (SLR) and storm surge inundation are major concerns along the coast of the San Francisco Bay (the Bay Area), impacting both coastal communities and critical infrastructure networks. The oil industry comprises a complex and critical infrastructure network located in the Bay Area. There is an urgent need to assess consequences and identify risk-based solutions to increase the resilience of this industrial network in the Bay Area to SLR and storm surge. In this study, a comprehensive multi-modal network model representing the fuel supply system was built. A total of 120 coastal flooding scenarios, including four General Circulation Models, two Representative Concentration Pathways, three percentiles of future SLR estimates, and five planning horizons (20-year intervals from 2000 to 2100) were considered. The impact of coastal flooding on fuel transportation networks was studied at two different scales: regional and local. At the regional scale, basic network properties and network efficiency were analyzed across multiple flooding scenarios. At the local scale, cascading effects of individual node disruptions were simulated. Based on this research, smarter and more holistic risk-based adaptation strategies can be established which could lead to a more resilient fuel transportation network system.
Speaker:
Ms. Yiyi HE
PhD Candidate, University of California, Berkeley, United States
Ms. Yiyi HE is a Ph.D. candidate from the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her bachelor’s degree in City and Regional Planning from Nanjing University and her master’s degree in Environmental Planning from UC Berkeley. She is currently working as a data science fellow at the Berkeley D-lab. Prior to this, she worked as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Resident at GoogleX, a consultant for the World Bank's Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), a researcher at NASA DEVELOP, the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM), and the Federal Aviation Administration Consortium in Aviation Operations Research (NEXTOR III). Her research focuses on climate-induced weather impacts on complex critical infrastructure networks. Her previous work involves using 3D hydrodynamic flood models to simulate flooding in the Bay Area under different climate scenarios and analyze the impact of both coastal and inland flooding on a multi-modal fuel transportation network.
[ 12:00-12:45 ]
Topic:
Climate change adaptation and healthy cities: implications for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area
Internal migration from rural to urban areas is prevalent in China, with the Greater Bay Area as a major migration destination. Understanding the thermal adaptation of migrants is key to improving their adaptability to a new climate. This issue is urgent as urban heat islands compound the warming from global climate change in cities. However, the impact of people’s climatic background on their perception of a comfortable outdoor environment remains unclear. Therefore, it is necessary to provide human-centric assessments to understand better the personalized characteristics of heat exposure and climate adaptation. This seminar reflects on multiple approaches to addressing this issue, including environmental monitoring, surveys, wearable technologies for physiological measurements, and scaled outdoor experiments. My research highlights that physiological and psychological factors (including emotion and fatigue) are necessary to understand the thermal comfort of residents and migrants. There is significant interaction among thermal stress levels, climatic background, and short-term prior exposure environment. This seminar also discusses the implications of multi-sensory interactions and outdoor environmental quality for urban greenery management and climate-resilient urban design. A comfortable outdoor space would encourage outdoor activities and reduce energy consumption, thus promoting low carbon living and healthy cities.
Speaker:
Dr. Charlie Cho Kwong LAM
Associate Researcher, School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, China
Educated as an urban climatologist specializing in heat stress and human thermal comfort, Dr. Cho Kwong Charlie Lam completed his PhD in atmospheric sciences at Monash University, Australia. Currently, he is a Research Associate at the School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-Sen University, China. His research uses field measurements and numerical simulations to study urban microclimate, climate change adaptation, and climate-resilient urban design. Moreover, his research examines the multi-sensory influence on outdoor thermal comfort, as well as physiological and psychological adaptation to heat. He is an editorial advisory board member of the International Journal of Biometeorology.
