Chaopeng earned his PhD from Tsinghua University in 2017, where he worked with Profs. Qiang Zhang and Kebin He. At UC Irvine, Chaopeng has worked to update assess the effect of air pollution on California agriculture as part of the NSF INFEWS project led by Prof. Davis. He has also analyzed the drivers of global and regional land-use greenhouse gas emissions. His research interests lie in coupled human–environment systems and sustainable systems analysis, including the complex interactions between coupled systems (such as climate change, air quality, agriculture, and human health).

We estimate country-, process-, GHG- and product-specific land-use emissions 1961-2017. Total emissions have increased to 14.6 GtCO_2-eq in 2017 (~25% of anthropogenic GHG emissions). Our results may help prioritize mitigation efforts, but suggest drastic reductions in emissions will require similarly drastic changes in agricultural production and/or practices.

We show that direct radiative effects of short-lived aerosols may substantially offset the "climate penalty" that prior studies have shown (i.e. that future climate change is likely to worsen air quality and thereby human health in most regions by favoring weather conditions that increase concentrations of air pollution).

By analyzing 35 years of temperature, ozone levels, and crop yield data, we estimate the impacts of warming and ozone pollution on perennial fruits and nuts in California. These crops, which represent ~38% of the state's agriculture by value, suffer damages of about $1 billion per year due to ozone in recent years. With 2°C of warming, almond yields will drop by ~10%.

Future climate change may exacerbate the impacts of Chinese air pollution by increasing the frequency and duration of weather conditions that enhance pollution exposure. Under a scenario that avoids 3°C of mean warming but holds emissions constant, we estimate 12,100 and 8,900 more Chinese will die each year from PM2.5 and ozone exposure, respectively.

If operated as historically, existing fossil energy infrastructure will emit >650 Gt of CO₂, well over the most recent 1.5°C carbon budgets and 2/3 of the remaining 2°C budget. There is thus little or no room for new fossil infrastructure under the targets; rather existing infrastructure must be retired early.

Differences in Chinese cities’ carbon intensity are largely due to disparities in economic structure that can in turn be traced to past investment-led growth. Related carbon lock-in may hinder China’s efforts to reduce emissions from activities in urban areas.

We assess fuel- and region-specific opportunities for reducing undesirable air pollutant emissions using a newly developed emission dataset at the level of individual generating units. Retiring or installing emission control technologies on units representing 0.8% of the global coal-fired power plant capacity could reduce levels of PM2.5 emissions by 8–14%.

Hong et al. attempt to improve the understanding of uncertainties in China’s energy statistics and evaluate their impacts on China’s emissions during the period of 1990–2013.