Research

The U.S.-sponsored Rehabilitation Act allocated significant financial and material aid to rebuild the country’s healthcare system, including hospitals, medical supplies, and training for health professionals. The proposed project will explore the interactions between international donors, the central government, local governments, and non-state actors in this context, revealing how foreign aid, driven by geopolitical interests and complicated by the fragmented geography of the archipelago and socio-political conditions, shaped public health policies and outcomes in the postwar period.

The project will employ archival research, drawing from both U.S. and Philippine sources, and integrate qualitative and quantitative analyses to assess the effectiveness of postwar health interventions.

The project’s broader contribution will lie in its historiographical analysis of how post-conflict health reconstruction in the Philippines intersected with larger political, economic, and socio-cultural systems. By situating this reconstruction within the larger context of international aid and local cultural practices, the study will highlight the tensions between global health priorities and local needs. This research will also provide critical insights into how post-conflict policies contributed to long-term health disparities in this setting, offering valuable lessons for contemporary post-conflict health rebuilding efforts in other regions.

The main source of buildings’ energy consumption and carbon emissions is the so-called Operational Energy and Carbon (OEC), which is generated from lifetime use of cooling facilities (e.g., ventilation and air-conditioning). Building decarbonization relies on efforts from all stakeholders and depends heavily on what new technology options will be chosen and eventually be developed into more reliable and cost-effective ones suitable for largescale application in HK. Unfortunately, the HK’s Climate Action Plan is silent on which technologies we aim to develop and how to implement them territory-wide under government-led policies and regulations. This proposed project has the following two objectives:

• To identify and develop promising building technologies according to their efficacy and viability, for maximizing carbon reduction and energy efficiency, applicable for both existing and new buildings in HK, and to significantly reduce OEC towards a carbon neutral HK by 2050.
• To integrate the developed innovative technologies with net-zero policies and regulations in the built sector, and to provide a feasible and accountable roadmap to the HK government for implementation, from lab-scale prototypes to real-size demo flats and eventually to city-scale deployment.

We have formed a team of leading experts in environmental and mechanical engineering, material science and engineering, and public policy from HKUST/PolyU/CityU along with key stakeholders (HK Environmental Protection Department and Green Building Council) to develop, assess, and deploy innovative technologies and solutions for buildings in HK. We will take a systems-based and problem-driven collaborative approach, and we will incorporate smart energy-saving building envelopes, advanced cooling materials and green air-conditioning systems into the larger social, economic, political and technological context of HK towards building decarbonization. The goal of this project is to provide evidence-based solid engineering solutions and policy and regulatory recommendations for HK to realize building decarbonization. The research will advance the existing knowledge and hardware-software for building sector, promote a reshaping of the building industry of HK and eventually establish HK as an international center of excellence in this field. The project outcome will also be applicable to heavily urbanized cities in mainland China and worldwide.