Policy Analysis Project with the Mongolian Ministry of Environment & Green Development
We estimated the health impacts of several reasonable pollution-control policy pathways for the Mongolian capital city of Ulaanbaatar through 2025. Policy pathways include considerations for household heating, electricity generation, and traffic, and are used to model outdoor and indoor environmental exposures to particulate matter less than 2.5 microns (PM2.5). Integrated exposure estimates are then calculated, and a modified version of our group’s HAPIT tool is used to estimate health impacts based on measurements and modeling. This project is a close collaboration with the Ministry of Environment & Green Development and colleagues at the Health Sciences University of Mongolia, the University of California, Irvine, and Washington University in St. Louis. Project members include L. Drew Hill (HHECH Group, UC Berkeley), Yuma Damdinsuren (Clean Air Fund), Rufus Edwards (UC Irvine), Jay Turner (WUSTL), and Purvedorj Baljinnyam (HSUM). The principle investigators are Chimedsuren Ochir (HSUM) and Kirk R. Smith (HHECH Group, UC Berkeley). The report was submitted
Air Pollution and Impact Analysis of a Pilot Stove Intervention, 2015, Report to the Ministry of Health and Inter-Ministerial Clean Stove Initiative of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, final Report, Environmental Health Sciences, UC Berkeley, July.
And the final updated and revised results were published as
Hill LD, Edwards R, Turner JR, Argo YD, Olkhanud PB, Odsuren M, Guttikunda S, Ochir C, Smith KR, 2017, Health assessment of future PM2.5 exposures from indoor, outdoor, and secondhand tobacco smoke concentrations under alternative policy pathways in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. PLoS ONE12 (10): e0186834.
Pilot Study of Advanced Heat Pumps for Eliminating Household Coal Use in Ulaanbaatar
In winter 2017/18, we installed seven advanced Chinese heat pumps in gers and households in Ulaanbaatar as a demonstration of eliminating household coal use for spaceheating. These pumps operate more efficiently than normal electric heating down to minus 40 degrees centigrade and thus should do well in Mongolian conditions and provide a cost-effective and clean alternative to coal heating. We are monitoring their performance in some detail to determine if their promotion should become part of the policies to eliminate coal use in the city. This work is done in collaboration with colleagues in Mongolia at the Building Energy Conservation Center at the Mongolian University of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Energy, and in China at the Building Science Department of Tsinghua University and Gree Electric Appliances, Inc. of Zhuhai