A Vietnamese student studying at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT)
based in Thailand has won the Best Master’s Student paper award
from the West Coast Section – Air and Waste Management Association from
the United States.
He is Nguyen Hong
Phuc, an AIT environmental engineering and management (EEM) graduate
student, whose winning paper is titled “Assessment of Air Quality and
Climate Co-benefit for Residential Combustion Sector in the Red River
Delta, Vietnam”.
In the paper, written along with his
advisor Dr. Nguyen Thi Kim Oanh, Phuc also found evidence that reducing
indoor air pollutants led to the positive result of increased air
quality at local levels and decreased emissions of greenhouses gases at
the global scale. This finding was achieved through a device set up to
monitor how much carbon dioxide equivalent could be reduced in the
defined rural locality, and through a survey, he said.
By
studying one area in the Red River region, he was able to identify
what kind of fuel or mix of fuels was the most environmentally suitable.
Phuc proposed a combination of rice-straw and liquefied petroleum gas
as the best option for the future.
Around 70 percent of
Vietnam’s population live in rural areas. It is estimate that about a
third of Vietnam’s energy consumption is from traditional biomass
and waste, and nearly 60 percent of the biomass is consumed by
households, mainly in the countryside.-VNA