OCES Departmental Seminar: How do land, agricultural and dietary changes affect human health and marine ecosystems via modifying the atmosphere?
East Asia has undergone dramatic socioeconomic and environmental changes over the past few decades. In this talk, we will examine a few examples of how such changes may have led to unexpected human health and ecological consequences via Earth system connections. Integrating long-term datasets with Earth system modeling, for instance, we will show how land cover and climatic changes in East Asian deserts might have affected dust emissions there, thus influencing dust air quality in China and deposition onto the North Pacific Ocean, where dust provides nutrients for marine ecosystems. We will further show how dietary changes in the Chinese population, mainly in the form of higher meat consumption, might have enhanced agricultural ammonia emissions and worsened particulate matter pollution in China, thus leading to more premature deaths. We will further discuss how more sustainable dietary options and agricultural/land-use management may help alleviate some of these pressing environmental problems.
Dr. Amos P. K. Tai is an Associate Professor in the Earth System Science Programme of the Faculty of Science, as well as the Associate Director of the Office of University General Education, at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He specializes in atmospheric chemistry and physics, agricultural and forest meteorology, and biosphere-atmosphere interactions. His research combines high-performance Earth system modeling and multivariate statistical analysis of observations to examine the complex interactions between ecosystems and the atmosphere, addressing pressing issues related to climate change, environmental pollution, ecosystem degradation and food security. His work has been published in top-ranking journals in the atmospheric and environmental sciences including Nature Climate Change and Nature Food, and earned him the WMO Research Award for Young Scientists, Early Career Award from the Research Grants Council, and founding membership of the Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences. Amos obtained his B.Sc. from MIT, Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Engineering from Harvard, and was a Croucher Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT before joining CUHK in 2013.
please contact jclmak@ust.hk for Zoom link
(please contact jclmak@ust.hk for Zoom link)