Wenjia Cai

Tsinghua University | TH · Department of Earth System Science

In response to a growing demand for subnational and spatially explicit data on China’s future population, this study estimates China’s provincial population from 2010 to 2100 by age (0–100+), sex (male and female) and educational levels (illiterate, primary school, junior-high school, senior-high school, college, bachelor’s, and master’s and above)...

Background The announcement of China's 2060 carbon neutrality goal has drawn the world's attention to the specific technology pathway needed to achieve this pledge. We aimed to evaluate the health co-benefits of carbon neutrality under different technology pathways, which could help China to achieve the carbon neutrality goal, air quality goal, and...

Although widely recognized as the key to climate goals, coal "phase down" has long been argued for its side effects on energy security and social development. Retrofitting coal power units with biomass and coal co-firing with a carbon capture and storage approach provides an alternative way to avoid these side effects and make deep carbon dioxide e...

Background Despite the emerging carbon neutrality pledges from different countries, it is still unclear how much these pledges would cost and how the costs would compare with the economic benefits. Comparisons at the country level are important for tightening country-specific emissions trajectories to keep the temperature limit targets outlined in...

With growing health risks from climate change and a trend of increasing carbon emissions from coal, it is time for China to take action. The rising frequency and severity of extreme weather events in China, such as record-high temperatures, low rainfall, severe droughts, and floods in many regions (along with the compound and ripple effects of thes...

在国家重点研发计划支持下,项目提出了陆表不均一性检测和订正的新方法,解决了渐变型不均一性检测和订正的难题,构建了中国地表太阳辐射、气温、地温、风速和降水等参数均一化站点和格点数据集,修订了关于中国地表风速变化趋势、增温格局及其形成机制的结论。融合多源数据,构建并验证了千米级、流域级或县域级的电厂、人口、生物质能、取水量、氮排放、二氧化碳排放等影响自然系统的关键人文要素历史和未来预估数据集。构建了未来关键人文要素情景,研制了碳中和目标下甲烷和氧化亚氮排放情景和用于驱动全球模式的未来情景,预估了中国碳中和战略的实施对全球变暖的减缓作用,发现中国碳中和对远期和中期全球变暖的减缓作用显著。给出了中国各省份水体氮排放安全阈值及超越时间,阐明了中国粮食产量与氮施肥的关系,提出了在保障粮食安全的前提下减少...

Evidence shows a continuing increase in the frequency and severity of global heatwaves1,2, raising concerns about the future impacts of climate change and the associated socioeconomic costs3,4. Here we develop a disaster footprint analytical framework by integrating climate, epidemiological and hybrid input–output and computable general equilibrium...

Climate change significantly impacts human health, exacerbating existing health inequalities and creating new ones. This study addresses the lack of systematic review in this area by analyzing 2440 publications, focusing on four key terms: health, disparities, environmental factors, and climate change. Strict inclusion criteria limited the selectio...

China’s carbon-neutral target could have benefits for ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5)-associated mortality. Although previous studies have researched such benefits, the potential impact on cardiovascular disease incidence burden is yet to be investigated thoroughly. Here, we first estimate the association between short-term PM2.5 exposure a...

Communities play a crucial role in protecting the health of vulnerable populations such as the elderly, low-income groups, and high-risk individuals during cold spells. However, current strategies for responding to cold spells primarily consist of programmatic policies that lack practicality, specificity, and detailed implementation guidelines for...

Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) is a zoonotic disease caused by the rodent-transmitted orthohantaviruses (HVs), with China possessing the most cases globally. The virus hosts in China are Apodemus agrarius and Rattus norvegicus , and the disease spread is strongly influenced by global climate dynamics. To assess and predict the spatiot...

Cities play a fundamental role in policy decision-making processes, necessitating the availability of city-level population projections to better understand future population dynamics and facilitate research across various domains, including urban planning, shrinking cities, GHG emission projections, GDP projections, disaster risk mitigation, and p...

Landscape fire smoke, including smoke from all vegetation burning in natural and cultural landscapes, remains a threat to the health of the population. However, the future health impacts of landscape fire smoke in China have not been sufficiently investigated. We aimed to estimate the mortality risk attributable to landscape fire-related PM 2·5 und...

Background Landscape fire smoke, including smoke from all vegetation burning in natural and cultural landscapes, remains a threat to the health of the population. However, the future health impacts of landscape fire smoke in China have not been sufficiently investigated. We aimed to estimate the mortality risk attributable to landscape fire-related...

Climate change is expected to increase occupational heat stress, which will lead to diminished work performance and labor losses worldwide. However, sub-regional analyses remain insufficient, especially for countries with a heterogeneous spatial distribution of working populations, industries and climates. Here, we projected heat-induced labor loss...

Leveraging climate actions for healthy ageingWenjia Cai1†, Chi Zhang2†, Shihui Zhang1†, Yuqi Bai1, Max Callaghan3, Nan Chang4, Bin Chen5,Huiqi Chen6, Liangliang Cheng6, Xueqin Cui1, Hancheng Dai7, Bawuerjiang Danna8,Wenxuan Dong9,10, Weicheng Fan9,10, Xiaoyi Fang11, Tong Gao12, Yang Geng13, Dabo Guan1,Yixin Hu14, Junyi Hua15, Cunrui Huang16, Hong H...

Given the urgency of addressing climate change and the declining demand for steel, it is imperative that China's iron and steel industry begin phasing out its primary production facility, the blast furnace. While there are various studies examining the decarbonization pathways for this sector and the resulting impacts, research exploring how to des...

Humidity and temperature may pose joint effects on human health. However, current temperature-related risk assessments generally focus on univariate temperature statistics, leading to inaccurate risk estimation. By combining temperature and humidity intensities as compound temperature-humidity events (hereinafter as compound events), we examined th...

Assessing biomass resource potential is essential for China’s ambitious goals of carbon neutrality, rural revitalization, and poverty eradication. To fill the data gap of high spatial resolution biomass resources in China, this study estimates the biomass resource potential for all types of lignocellulosic biomass feedstock at 1 km resolution in 20...

Climate change is one of the biggest health threats of the 21st century. Although China is the biggest developing country, with a large population and different climate types, its projections of large-scale heat-related excess mortality remain understudied. In particular, the effects of climate change on aging populations have not been well studied...

Background: Future climate change is likely to alter cold spell-related disease burden. Few projection studies have considered the potential impact of the aging population with changing population size on cold spell-related disease burdens. Methods: We derived the association between cold spells and daily mortality for 272 main cities in mainlan...

Background: We have limited knowledge on the impact of hydrometeorological conditions on dengue incidence in China and its associated disease burden in a future with a changed climate. This study projects the excess risk of dengue caused by climate change-induced hydrometeorological conditions across mainland China. Methods: In this modelling st...

As a major economy with large amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and ecosystem carbon sink, China’s commitment and pathway towards carbon neutrality is of global importance. Faced with the dual challenges of sustained economic growth and environmental protection, there is pressing need to integrate scientific knowledge from multiple discipli...

The thorough transition of energy system is required to achieve the Paris Agreement goal. Computable general equilibrium (CGE) models are a common tool for estimating the energy transition pathway and the impact of low-carbon policies on economic growth. However, CGE models encounter challenges on modeling diffusion of new technologies. This study...

Incorporating health cobenefits from coabated air pollution into carbon mitigation policy making is particularly important for developing countries to boost policy efficiency. For sectors that highly depend on electrification for decarbonization, it remains unclear how the increased electricity demand and consequent health impacts from sectoral mit...

To avoid catastrophic climate change, the world is promoting a fast and unprecedented transition from fuels to renewables. However, the infrastructures of renewables, such as wind turbines and solar cells, rely heavily on critical minerals like rare earths, indium, etc. Such interactions between climate targets, energy transitions, and critical min...

It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the planet, which is seriously affecting the planetary health including human health. Adapting climate change should not only be a slogan, but requires a united, holistic action and a paradigm shift from crisis response to an ambitious and integrated approach immediately. Recognizing the urgent need...

This article takes stock of recent literature on health impacts of climate change and air pollution, and the corresponding health benefits of policy action aiming to reduce greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions. We focus particularly on the publications in the Focus Collection on ‘Climate Change, Air Pollution and Human Health’, which illustra...

The design of “fairness” and “justice” climate policies for controlling indirect household carbon emissions (IHCEs) requires joint efforts from the demand side and supply side. On the demand side, this study constructs behavior-specific IHCEs inventory for different household groups (differed by income level) in different regions to identify high-e...

The 2022 report of the Lancet Countdown is published as the world confronts profound and concurrent systemic shocks. Countries and health systems continue to contend with the health, social, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Russia's invasion of Ukraine and a persistent fossil fuel overdependence has pushed the world into global...

A health-friendly, climate resilient, and carbon-neutral pathway would deliver major benefits to people's health and wellbeing in China, especially for older populations, while simultaneously promoting high-quality development in the long run. This report is the third China Lancet Countdown report, led by the Lancet Countdown Regional Centre based...

Climate change and air pollution are primarily caused by the combustion and utilization of fossil fuels. Both climate change and air pollution cause health problems. Based on the development of China, it is extremely important to explore the synergies of the energy transition, CO2 reduction, air pollution control, and health improvement under the t...

Background In China, most previous projections of heat-related mortality have been based on modeling studies using global climate models (GCMs), which can help to elucidate the risks of extreme heat events in a changing climate. However, spatiotemporal changes in the health effects of climate change considering specific regional characteristics rem...

Carbon pricing policies are effective tools for mitigating carbon emissions; however, they also alter income distributions. Progressive individual income tax systems help redistribute income and reduce inequality. This paper evaluates the effects of carbon pricing policies and revenue recycling schemes on inequality and assesses the redistributive...

This article argues that human health has become a key consideration in recent global reports on climate change and biodiversity produced by various international organisations; however, greater attention must be given to the unequal health impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss around the world and the different health adaptation measures...

Background In the past decades, climate change has been impacting human lives and health via extreme weather and climate events and alterations in labour capacity, food security, and the prevalence and geographical distribution of infectious diseases across the globe. Climate change and health indicators (CCHIs) are workable tools designed to captu...

Since China's announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2015, much focus has been drawn on the environmental impacts of China's energy investments in the countries along the BRI. The economic and social impacts of these investments, which are also important for the wellbeing for local people, left largely uninvestigated. In this paper,...

The heterogeneity in energy consumption between households has long been neglected, leading to the low effectiveness of one-size-fits-all demand-side policies. Here, we investigate energy consumption patterns and home appliance purchasing preferences of different urban households. In this study, 1921 urban households in China were empirically class...

Large-scale development of bioenergy is indispensable in dealing with the climate change challenge. The biomass resource may become a limiting factor for the utilization of bioenergy in mitigating carbon emissions in the future. For supporting formulating a feasible long-term strategy for bioenergy development, it is crucial to conduct an ex-ante e...

The potential adverse impact of international trade on the environment has received growing attention in recent years. Growing environmental pressure poses significant challenges to sustainable development, further highlighting the need for a comprehensive response to tackling the unsustainable food use driven by the soybean trade. Although a signi...

Coal power production is the second largest source of water demand in China. However, as coal power would undergo significant changes under ambitious climate goals (2℃ or 1.5℃), it’s not clear how the low-carbon transition of the power sector made at the provincial level would affect the catchment-level water resources in the future. With a power s...

Usually, previous studies on the future development pathway of coal power are based on the economic models to provide the administrative pathways, or the coal-fired power plants dataset to provide bottom-up pathways with the multi-scenario hypothesis. However, these two methods above are difficult to be combined: there is a gap between the comprehe...

Heat stress caused by climate change and heat-related labor productivity losses have become global concerns. Estimating the economic impacts of heat stress is of great significance for employers, as well as sectoral and national policy makers who are searching for solutions to reduce productivity losses. As the value of economic impacts are sensiti...

Background The health impacts of ambient air pollution impose large costs on society. Although all people are exposed to air pollution, the older population (ie, those aged ≥60 years) tends to be disproportionally affected. As a result, there is growing concern about the health impacts of air pollution as many countries undergo rapid population age...

Almost all global scenarios under ambitious climate targets rely on the deployment of negative emission technologies (NETs). Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and afforestation are two promising NET options. However, their roles in most countries’ deep decarbonization pathways and the potential economic and environmental implication...

Policy on household carbon reduction behavior has an important role on climate actions but is neglected in practice. Household energy consumption is uncontrolled under the current policy both in the developed and developing countries, which is inefficient towards an ambitious climate target. Household participation in emission trading scheme (ETS)...

Understanding and addressing the complex effects of climate change on planetary health requires a multidisciplinary approach. Here, experts share their experience working at the intersection of health and climate. Their Voices advocate for cooperation, rethinking the concept of sustainability,and urge for immediate action to preserve global health.

We conduct a multi-model comparison of a carbon tax policy in China to examine how different models simulate the impacts in both near-term 2020, medium-term 2030, and distant future 2050. Though Top-down computable general equilibrium (CGE) models have been applied frequently on climate or other environmental/energy policies to assess emission redu...

To avoid the irreversible impact of global climate change on human society, many countries have recently put forward ambitious goals to accelerate the low-carbon transition of energy systems. Among low-carbon measures, retrofitting existing coal power plants with biomass co-firing is regarded as a promising cost-efficient option to mitigate greenho...

Water is a fundamental and essential resource for sustainable and healthy development of natural environment and human society. China boasts considerable water resources but is below world average on a per capita basis, and is challenged by the disparity in temporal and geographical distribution and poor utilization of water resources, severe water...

Incorporating the health impacts into all kinds of policy decisions has become the shared expectations of policymakers and the public, hoping to obtain the most significant health benefits with the least policy costs. The value of statistical life (VSL), which represents the additional cost that individuals are willing to reduce the risk of death,...

To celebrate the first anniversary of Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, we asked six researchers investigating weather and climate to outline notable developments within their discipline and provide thoughts on important work yet to be done. Broadly, what are some of the key advances and exciting future prospects in your discipline within weathe...

The Lancet Countdown is an international collaboration established to provide an independent, global monitoring system dedicated to tracking the emerging health profile of the changing climate. The 2020 report presents 43 indicators across five sections: climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerabilities; adaptation, planning, and resilience...

As a major GHG emissions source with large growth potential, the passenger transport sector plays a crucial role in deep decarbonization in China. Large disparities among provinces in private vehicle ownership, sufficiency of public transport infrastructure, affordability of clean fuel vehicles, etc. highlight the importance of regionally tailored...

The targets of limiting global warming levels below 2°C or even 1.5°C set by Paris Agreement heavily rely on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which can remove carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and achieve net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. Biomass and coal co‐firing with CCS is one of BECCS technologies, as well as a pathway t...

China’s coal-fired power industry urgently needs deep decarbonization to meet the challenge of climate change. Regional air quality improvement and the health benefits can motivate efforts to achieve low-carbon goals. However, the health cobenefit per amount of carbon reduction may vary drastically across power plant units. The strategy of targetin...

China's CO2 emissions declined by 5.1% in 2013-2016 as China steps into a new period of development, in which the economy shifts from the previous high-speed growth driven by input and investment to a medium-speed growth driven by innovation and consumption. However, the decline did not continue; the national CO2 emissions rebounded since 2016, wit...

Urban boundaries, an essential property of cities, are widely used in many urban studies. However, extracting urban boundaries from satellite images is still a great challenge, especially at a global scale and a fine resolution. In this study, we developed an automatic delineation framework to generate a multi-temporal dataset of global urban bound...

In 2018, a total of US$166 billion global economic losses and a new high of 55.3 Gt of CO2 equivalent emission were generated by 831 climate-related extreme events. As the world's largest CO2 emitter, we reported China's recent progresses and pitfalls in climate actions to achieve climate mitigation targets (i.e., limit warming to 1.5–2°C above the...

An energy supply dominated by the use of fossil fuels causes both climate change and air pollution, which have negative impacts on human capital via both health and productivity. In addition, different people are affected differently because of factors such as age, gender and education level. To enhance the understanding of the benefits of low carb...

Achieving low-carbon strategic goals requires large-scale application of several key mitigation technologies, which may bring potential impacts in economic, social, and environmental aspects, which in turn is not conducive to achieving low-carbon goals. A comprehensive cost-benefit analysis framework has been proposed for the evaluation of key miti...

Background The health impacts of ambient air pollution impose large costs on society. While all people are exposed to air pollution, older individuals tend to be disproportionally affected. As a result, there is growing concern about the public health impacts of air pollution as many countries undergo rapid population ageing. We investigated the sp...

On March 1, 2012, the Chinese government implemented the Administrative Measures on Heatstroke Prevention (AMHP2012) to combat the occupational health impacts of extreme heat, and reducing occupational injury was one of the main purposes. This study aimed at quantifying the interventional effects of the AMHP2012 on extreme heat-related occupational...

共享社会经济路径（Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, SSPs）是新一代气候变化情景的重要组成部分。SSPs 从提 出至今已有 10 年的发展，对于推动气候变化预估与影响研究、支撑气候政策决策的作用逐渐凸显。文中基于 179 篇主 题检索文献分析了 SSPs 发展和应用的进展，以及在当前气候变化研究中的应用特点。研究发现，次国家和部门层面的 SSPs 故事线拓展开始兴起，水资源、土地和健康是影响评估领域的关注焦点，方法学上强调模型间耦合与多模型比较。 当前 SSPs 在中国的发展与应用集中于基本要素的预估及气候影响评估，路径对各省间及城乡间社会经济发展差异的刻 画有待加强。基于情景发展和应用的现状，最后从加强与气候建模团队的合作、支持影响与脆弱性研究、拓展全球情景、...

Given the threats that anthropogenic climate change would pose to human health, tackling climate change is identified to be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century by the 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change. The Lancet Countdown was then initiated, as an international and multidisciplinary collaboration dedicated...

To achieve nationally determined contribution (NDC) targets, China has developed a series of low carbon development plans. Among them, the clean energy transformation is very crucial. This study evaluates the impact of a set of policies including the development of renewable energy, upgrading heavy industry, and energy efficiency improvement on Chi...

The Lancet Countdown is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration, dedicated to monitoring the evolving health profile of climate change, and providing an inde pendent assessment of the delivery of commitments made by governments worldwide under the Paris Agreement. The 2019 report presents an annual update of 41 indicators across five key...

The Lancet Countdown is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration, dedicated to monitoring the evolving health profile of climate change, and providing an independent assessment of the delivery of commitments made by governments worldwide under the Paris Agreement. The 2019 report presents an annual update of 41 indicators across five key d...

Renewables rely heavily on critical materials. Such material (metal)-energy nexus thinking is critical to guarantee global renewable transition. As the largest energy consumer, China aims to promote the unprecedented installation of renewables to significantly decarbonize energy system till 2050. However, the material constraints to those renewable...