Pioneering environmental auditing environmental sciences
The cooperation between Professors Lü Yonglong and Arthur Mol gives China multiple tools to investigate environmental issues and Dutch scientists a chance to tackle challenges of a scale and complexity not found at home. “I’m an international guy,” says Professor Lü Yonglong, chair of the Regional Ecological Risk Assessment and Environmental Management Group at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences. The Center is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Professor Lü works with scientists from all over the world. “But our joint work with the Netherlands is quite special,” he says. “It combines the natural science approach we use here and the social science method of analysing environmental issues applied by Professor Arthur Mol and his team at Wageningen University. We complement one another extremely well.” With financial support from the China Exchange Programme and the CAS-KNAW Joint PhD Training Programme, the teams led by Professors Lü and Mol work on developing methods to assess the environmental impact of large-scale projects. Common interest “We share a common language and a common interest in solving environmental issues,” says Professor Lü. “At the request of the National Auditing Office in China, we developed a method for environmental auditing. We spend lot of money on pollution control, for example, but we need to know how many of the environmental goals have ultimately been achieved. The Netherlands is very advanced in this field, so we discussed this with our Dutch
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