PhD in International Development

Current position: Researcher, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

Research focus: clean production and sustainable consumption

Jiamin endeavours to advance the knowledge and the methods to aid the shift towards sustainable production and consumption (UN Sustainable Development Goal 12) and promote good health and well-being (UN Sustainable Development Goal 3). By bridging the conventional tools in environmental economics, atmospheric chemistry, and exposure-risk models, she demonstrates the full chain of material and emission flows between producers, consumers, and environmental receptors and exposes a more complete cause-and-effect relationship across different systems.

With the core of environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) models, the demands and behaviours of producers and consumers are linked to various environmental end-points such as climate forcing, air-pollutant concentration, and disease burden. Jiamin has applied this methodology in studies at local and provincial level in China and on the global supply chain. She investigated the sustainability of production and consumption in two distinguished provinces in China/Guangdong and Tibet. Most recently, she studied how production and consumption associated with ground-level O3 precursors have been distributed around the world through the global supply chain.  She hopes that her research could reveal the hidden responsibilities in current production and consumption and the opportunities for their sustainable transition.

Her next project is to investigate patterns of consumption at granularity level such as individuals. She wants to study the consumption at micro-level and how individual consumption adds up and affects the bigger environment.  

As an excellent interdisciplinary scientist, Jiamin was awarded by the jury for her studies on sustainable production and consumption and her efforts to fasten sustainable transition.

Take a look at this video that briefly introduces Jiamin and her research: