Environmental research

Targeted Location and Population: The project site is located in northwest of Yuncheng city and southwest of Shanxi Provinc, which is the biggest energy province and coal province in China. The project target population is 150 households of villagers distributed in 4 villages with mostly Han people. The main income of local villagers is from agriculture and becoming migrant workers and their income is not stable. Although the project area is located in coal mining areas, villagers can only use coal slurry and straw for boiling water, cooking and heating due to the coal prices rising in recent years. Problems: 1.Kang (the heatable brick bed) is the essential household facility in north China for cooking and heating. The traditional heatable brick bed has obvious drawbacks such as high energy consumption, low heat efficiency and energy sources waste. The energy saving and environment-friendly heating system is not known by the local villagers. 2.The villagers are lack of environmental protection awareness, energy saving technology and climate change knowledge. Solutions/ planned activities: 1. Conduct questionnaire survey, door-to-door visits, participatory investigation and symposium for target villagers. 2. Encourage villagers to plant trees as a condition to get their traditional heatable brick bed transformed. 3. Remove the traditional heatable brick bed and construct the energy-saving heatable brick bed for target households. 4.Work with the village committee to train the villagers on energy saving and climate change and publicize the knowledge of climate change. 5.Work with media to further raise public awareness on energy saving and climate change. Anticipated results/ immediate outputs of this project: 1. Energy saving heatable brick bed is constructed for 150 target households, which can reduce 1,723kg carbon dioxide emission. One family can save 900 RMB per year from energy saving. 2. about 1000 villagers knows climate change and energy saving knowledge. 3. Local media and public pay more attention on climate change issues.

China