The Better Air Quality 2012 Conference comes back to Hong Kong this year and is an annual event organized by the Clean Air Asia, which was formerly the Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities (CAI-Asia), attended by government leaders, policymakers, NGOs, the academe, private companies and other stakeholders. It is actually my first time to attend the conference though colleagues have participated in the past. This year I am participating as a transport expert and will be involved in two events – a BAQ pre-event and a session during the conference itself.

The pre-event to be held at the Hotel Nikko is on “Long Term Impacts of Low Emission Transport Policies and Actions in ASEAN” while the session in the conference is on “Transport, Energy and Emissions in 2050: Implications for Asia.” These are related as they are part of the same project implemented and supported by CAI-Asia, the Institution for Transport Policy Studies (ITPS) and the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL). There are five of us from various ASEAN universities including friends from Gadjah Mada University (Indonesia), University of Malaya (Malaysia) and Thammasat University (Thailand). I’m looking forward to a very productive conference and will post again soon about this project that we have been working on since last year.

Metro Manila smog visible in the background of this photo of our plane to Hong Kong

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