Human Resources Development for the improvement and protection of environment in Asia

The overall objective of the project is to upgrade the skills of University teaching staff in particular young faculty and future teachers in China and India in terms of environmental science specialized in industrial ecology and Sustainable Development thereby contributing to improving environmental quality in those target countries:

• To promote dissemination of principles of green design and pollution prevention among Chinese and Indian academics, practitioners and LGO officers enabling China and India to improve their own expertise in pollution prevention, green engineering, environmentally benign products so as to promote Sustainable Development in these regions.
• To promote intercommunication and information exchange on environmental topic between European and Asian partners involved in the project and to create a basis for their further cooperation.

Eco-construction comes at a crucial moment for the Asian Economy and especially for the Chinese and Indian ones.

According to most environmental economists worldwide, these countries are completing the process of primitive capital accumulation and are shifting from labor-intensive industrialization to capital-intensive industrialization.

In this phase, countries allow the least investment in environmental protection. Therefore, the environment is in danger of being destroyed.

Wetlands can conserve and purify water resources, prevent flooding and help protect bio-diversity. As well as ecological values, wetlands can also offer economic returns. However, in recent years, many natural wetlands in China and India have become farmland, hunting and fishing grounds or industrial areas. Also indiscriminate tree felling and water pollution have had direct impacts.

The on-going Three Gorges Dam project in China will provide the country with 18.2-gigawatt hydropower in 2009. However, the controversial dam also could prove to be an environmental disaster.

Because lack of the basic environmental infrastructures, for many years, tons of wastes from the cities along Yangtze River have been lazily piled up along the banks waiting for being washed away and drifting downstream by the rising water during the annual flood season.

Only China produces one quarter of the world's garbage. Most of the country's solid waste is buried, taking up land and harming the environment in several ways. Also hazardous industrial production, waste and decontamination are issues that need to be addressed.

By proper application of green engineering technologies, a waste may not necessary have to be a waste. A waste can be considered as a resource out of place. It is responsibility of pollution prevention personnel to find the right place to turn the waste into a resource.

In order to make this a reality, education and knowledge are needed.

The proposed project aims to address all these problems and to provide the target countries with knowledge and best practices to deal with the environmental problems arising from the economic development and to maintaining a dynamic balance between the demands of people for equity, prosperity and quality of life and what is ecologically possible.

The activities of the proposed project will focus on:

• Exchange and share of knowledge, experiences and best practices in the field of sustainable environmental science/engineering particularly contaminated land and/or water remediation, resource recycling, waste management and quality assurance for recycling materials, aquatic and wetland ecology, substance and material flow analysis, life cycle impact assessment in particular for construction material, biodiversity and land use in different dimensions through the Human Resources Exchange.
• Development of a Sandwich PhD programme for target Asian countries in mutual interest of European institutions and Asian universities according to the practical need. Each specific PhD program will be laid out according to the competence of each participating European institution and also corresponding Asian university.
• Operation of 4× 5-days intensive training courses in participating European institutions for young faculty members and even some future university teaching staff from Asian Universities thereby fostering transfer of knowledge, experiences and best practices to target groups in participating Asian countries and even to other developing countries in Asia.
• Development of concentrated course materials using updated research progress and teaching methodology originated in top ranked European Institutions and Integration of the course material developed into the ongoing Master of Science programme at each participating Asian university within environmental science/engineering, mechanical engineering and/or energy engineering, architecture and/or architectural engineering, civil engineering.
• Transfer of knowledge to target universities in Asia through 3 ×one-week topic-oriented workshops free of charge open for university professors, faculty members, postgraduate students, LGO officials, regulatory bodies, relevant engineers and designers.
• Establishment of close, effective, and sustainable co-operation among teaching staff (young teachers in particular) at the different partner universities through short teaching mission combined with research collaboration in European institutions, thus helping Asian University teaching staff to access to state-of-the-art education and research in the field concerned.
• Creation of opportunity for young Asian university teaching staff having access to good practices of European examples in the field of target topics through the arrangement of several technical tours/lab tours and field investigation/visiting. Vice versa, opportunity is also created for European university teaching staff being familiar with Asian examples in the target field.