主讲题目：Health irreversibilities, early-life exposure, haze, and oil palm in Indonesia

主讲人：Jie-Sheng Tan-Soo，新加坡国立大学

主持人：陈帅  “百人计划”研究员

时间：11月9日（周五）下午14:00-16:00

地点：浙江大学紫金港校区启真大厦1213

主讲人简介：

Jie-Sheng Tan-Soo is an Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. He received his PhD in Environmental Policy from the Nicholas School of the Environment and Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University in 2015. His research interests are broadly in the intersection of environment, health, and development. Some of the topics he has worked on are indoor air pollution from usage of biomass fuels and inefficient stoves, industrial pollution in China, air quality valuation, impact evaluation of water and sanitation interventions, ecosystem services provided by tropical forests. While the topics are interdisciplinary, he mainly uses microeconometrics techniques in combination with economic modeling to conduct empirical research.

摘要：Natural capital will be depleted rapidly and excessively if the long-term, offsite impacts of depletion are ignored. By examining the case of tropical forest burning, we illustrate such myopia: pursuit of short-term economic gains results in air pollution that causes long-term, irreversible health impacts. We integrate longitudinal data on prenatal exposure to the 1997 Indonesian forest fires with child nutritional outcomes and find that mean exposure to air pollution during the prenatal stage is associated with a half standard deviation decrease in height-for-age z-score at age 17, which is robust to several checks and tests. Because adult height is associated with income, this implies a loss of 4% of average monthly wages for approximately 1 million Indonesian workers born during this period. To put these human capital losses in context and illustrate how to mainstream such environmental health science into decision-making, we examine social welfare of oil palm plantations under different land-clearing practices and fire control policies, using the example of oil palm. Because the results depend on parameters such as haze attributable to oil palm fires, cost-effectiveness of fire suppression, enforcement of fire ban, and income growth, we recommend more nuanced and targeted policies to prevent fires, and protect natural and human capital.