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Advances and perspectives in environmental health research in China

• Perspectives
• Open access
• Published: 10 May 2024
• Volume 18 , article number  76 , ( 2024 )

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• Tong Zhu 1 , 2 ,
• Yingjun Liu 1 , 2 ,
• Shunqing Xu 3 ,
• Guanghui Dong 4 ,
• Cunrui Huang 5 ,
• Nan Sang 6 ,
• Yunhui Zhang 7 ,
• Guanyong Su 8 ,
• Jingwen Chen 9 ,
• Jicheng Gong 1 , 2 ,
• Guohua Qin 6 ,
• Xinghua Qiu 1 , 2 ,
• Jing Shang 1 , 2 ,
• Haobo Wang 9 ,
• Pengpeng Wang 10 &
• Mei Zheng 1 , 2  

Environmental health research aims to identify environmental conditions suitable for the healthy living and reproduction of human beings. Through the interdisciplinary research bridging environmental sciences and health/medical sciences, the impacts of physical, chemical, and biological environmental factors on human health are investigated. This includes identifying environmental factors detrimental to human health, evaluating human exposure characteristics to environmental factors, clarifying causal relationships between environmental exposure and health effects, analyzing the underlying biochemical mechanisms, linking environmental factors to the onset and progression of diseases, establishing exposure-response relationships, and determining effect thresholds. Ultimately, the results of environmental health research can serve as a scientific basis for formulating environmental management strategies and guiding prevention and intervention measures at both the public and individual levels. This paper summarizes the recent advances and future perspectives of environmental health research in China, as reported by a group of Chinese scientists who recently attended a workshop in Hainan, China. While it is not intended to provide a comprehensive review of this expansive field, it offers a glimpse into the significant progress made in understanding the health impacts of environmental factors over the past decade. Looking ahead, it is imperative not only to sustain efforts in studying the health effects of traditional environmental pollution, but also to prioritize research on the health impacts of emerging pollutants and climate change.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Environment and Health Branch of Chinese Society for Sustainability for organizing and Hainan University for hosting the workshop. We thank all participants of the workshop for stimulating discussion. This work is partially supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (No. 2022YFC3702600).

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

SKL-ESPC & SEPKL-AERM, Department of Environmental Health, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

Tong Zhu, Yingjun Liu, Jicheng Gong, Xinghua Qiu, Jing Shang & Mei Zheng

Center for Environment and Health, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

School of Life and Health Sciences, Huainan University, Haikou, 570228, China

Shunqing Xu

Joint International Research Laboratory of Environment and Health (Ministry of Education), Guangdong Provincial Engineering Technology Research Center of Environmental Pollution and Health Risk Assessment, Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, School of Public Health, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510080, China

Guanghui Dong

Vanke School of Public Health, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

Cunrui Huang

Research Center of Environment and Health, College of Environment and Resource, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, 030006, China

Nan Sang & Guohua Qin

Department of Environmental Health, School of Public Health, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200032, China

Yunhui Zhang

School of Environmental and Biological Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094, China

Guanyong Su

Key Laboratory of Industrial Ecology and Environmental Engineering (Ministry of Education), Dalian Key Laboratory on Chemicals Risk Control and Pollution Prevention Technology, School of Environmental Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China

Jingwen Chen & Haobo Wang

Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, College of Public Health, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, 450001, China

Pengpeng Wang

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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tong Zhu .

Ethics declarations

Conflict of Interests Tong Zhu is an advisory board member of Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering . The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Additional information

• Environmental health research has surged in China over the past decade

• The scope extends beyond health effects of classic pollutants to include those of emerging pollutants and climate change

• Future research priorities and opportunities are proposed

Author Biography

Dr. Tong ZHU is a Boya Chair Professor, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University.

He graduated with BSc and MSc from Peking University, and Dr. rer. nat in Physical Chemistry from Wuppertal University, Germany. He was a postdoc at the Center for Atmospheric Chemistry of York University, Canada (1991–1992), a postdoctoral fellow and contract research scientist at the Soil and Biological Resources Research Centre of Agriculture Canada (1993–1999). Since 1999, he holds a professor position at Peking University, was the founding director of the Center for Environment and Health (2007–2022) and the dean of the College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering (2012–2023). He is a member of Chinese Academy of Sciences (2021) and Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (2022), a Fellow of American Geophysical Union (2019), and appointed as a Counsellor of the State Council of People’s Republic of China (2020). His research focuses on Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Health, and has published more than 480 papers in Science, PNAS, JAMA and other journals, with a H-index of 87 (Google scholar). He is the chair of the advisory group of the NSFC major program “Fundamental researches on the formation and response mechanism of air pollution complex in China”, and the chair of Future Earth-Monsoon Asia Integrated Research for Sustainable Development (FE-MAIRS).

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Zhu, T., Liu, Y., Xu, S. et al. Advances and perspectives in environmental health research in China. Front. Environ. Sci. Eng. 18 , 76 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-024-1836-z

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-024-1836-z

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• Published: 10 May 2024

Striking a theoretical balance

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Modeling chemical processes and systems underpins progress in chemical engineering science; we encourage submissions in this domain.

This journal’s illustrative pre-launch image, included as this Editorial’s figure, is emblematic of the multi-scale nature of chemical engineering: the discipline is concerned with designing macroscopic processes (a control volume around the network of pipes), applying microscopic physics (an infinitesimally small volume element within a single pipe), and connecting these scales. The Editorial in our February issue discussed the importance of macroscopic systems-level thinking in process engineering and our Analysis article format that showcases works in this area ( Nat. Chem. Eng. 1 , 117–118; 2024 ). Here, we turn our attention to the continuum-level balances that form a key component of chemical engineering science.

Scientific advances are bolstered and often enabled by coordinated and concerted efforts in both experiment and theory. In the continuum limit, writing and solving mass, energy and momentum balances forms an important framework in chemical engineering for quantifying and advancing potentially practical devices, systems and processes. This framework not only allows one to explore regions of parameter space that may be challenging, costly or impossible to access otherwise, but also provides an avenue towards a complete picture of experimental findings through a quantitative evaluation of the physics that govern the system.

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This interest is highlighted on the cover of the current issue and in an Article by Lees and co-workers reporting a continuum multi-physics model that guides the device-scale performance of a CO 2 -to-CO electrolyzer. In this work, the researchers developed a one-dimensional model of a membrane electrode assembly (MEA) containing a Ag catalyst that was validated against their experimentally measured CO 2 crossover and CO formation rates. The modeling results show how electrolyzer performance is governed by coupled phenomena, for example, ion formation, ion transport, CO 2 solubility and water management.

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At Nature Chemical Engineering , we are interested to hear about your research advances in chemical engineering science stemming from all theoretical approaches, not just those related to continuum modeling. Such developments may lie in, for example, microkinetic modeling, multi-scale modeling to bridge atomic, molecular, mesoscopic and macroscopic scales, integrating machine learning and data-driven approaches with physics-based modeling, and thermodynamic modeling.

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