Daniel Dudek has visited China more than 200 times for various environmental projects. (Photo provided to China Daily)
Two things have made U.S. environmental expert Daniel Dudek very happy in the past few weeks.
The first was when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced on Oct 5 that the Paris Agreement on climate change is set to enter into force on Nov 4. The second: Member states of the UN civil aviation agency agreed on a new standard to control greenhouse gas emissions from international airline flights through a market-based plan.
As vice-president of the New York-based nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, the 69-year-old Dudek believes the market can be used to solve environmental problems.
The joint effort of the U.S. and China on environmental protection, he adds, is important to the world.
The leaders of the world's two biggest greenhouse gas-emitting countries, President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama, together announced their plans to ratify the Paris Agreement on the eve of the G20 summit in Hangzhou last month--"which pushed other countries to also make their commitment", Dudek says.
"Without that, I think, there would be no agreement."
Dudek himself began a long-term engagement with China in 1991, when the National Environmental Protection Agency, the predecessor of the current Ministry of Environmental Protection, invited him to Shandong province to share his experience of tackling the acid-rain problem using market-based methods.
Since then, Dudek has been traveling between the two countries, introducing the successful experience from the U.S. while learning about Chinese laws and institutions, so that he could advise on how to make the idea practical in China.
"We have to build an emission-trading program with Chinese characteristics," says Dudek.
After earning his PhD in agricultural economics in 1979 at the University of California at Davis, he went to work as an agricultural economist for the U.S. government.
Later, after going to teach at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in 1982, he saw how northeastern states of the U.S. were dramatically affected by acid rain caused by excessive sulfur dioxide from coal burning in the region.
"The acid rain was extremely bad, causing the acidification of the lakes, damaging forests, and our neighbors in Canada were very unhappy with us," recalls Dudek. He then became interested in solving the problem using a financial approach.
