CHICAGO, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) has forged a 5-year research collaboration with the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS).

The five-year collaboration aims to generate fresh insights into pressing energy and environmental challenges, offering Chinese policymakers new tools to tackle important priorities such as cost-effective reductions in air pollution.

Representatives of UChicago and UCAS have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on this recently.

The collaboration came on the heels of the Mandarin launch of EPIC's Air Quality Life Index (AQLI), a first-of-its-kind tool that allows policymakers to quantify the benefits of air pollution reduction measures by converting them into the most important metric that exists: improvements in life expectancy.

The AQLI is based on a pair of peer-reviewed studies co-authored by EPIC Director Michael Greenstone that quantify the causal relationship between long-term human exposure to particulate pollution and life expectancy.

Greenstone has spent more than two decades doing research on energy and environmental issues in China and other parts of the world. His research, together with research being conducted by other UChicago faculty, constitutes the roots of the new UCAS collaboration.

EPIC is an affiliate of the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI), which launched BFI-China in 2018. BFI announced a separate collaboration with Tsinghua University in November 2018 to form the Tsinghua University-University of Chicago Joint Research Center for Economics and Finance.