School of Energy and Environment (SEE) — Hong Kong's First Dedicated Energy and Environment School (2009)

Module: 01 Academics · Sub-file: School of Energy and Environment In 2009, "carbon neutrality" and "energy transition" had yet to become mainstream global agendas, yet City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) had already established a school specifically devoted to these issues — the School of Energy and Environment (SEE). More than a decade later, CityUHK ranked first in the world in the 2026 Times Higher Education Impact Rankings for SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), and SEE is one of the core schools underpinning that achievement. This article surveys its founding, positioning, curriculum and three research strategies. For the relationship between SEE's programmes and the College of Computing, see 01-academics/college-of-computing-2024.md.

---

# 1. Founding: the first of its kind in Hong Kong, 2009

According to publicly available information^※, SEE was established in July 2009^※, making it the first dedicated school of its kind in Hong Kong^※ and one of only a handful of such specialist schools in the Asia-Pacific region^※.

Establishing a dedicated "energy + environment" school in 2009 was a distinctly forward-looking move — at the time, "carbon neutrality" and "energy transition" were not yet mainstream global agendas. The move once again reflected CityUHK's instinct for "staking an early claim in emerging cross-disciplinary fields" (in the same mould as the School of Creative Media with digital media, or the Department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences with Hong Kong's then-vacant veterinary sector).

---

# 2. Positioning: built for the megacity

SEE's acronym is a happy pun — it stands for School of Energy and Environment, but also reads naturally as Sustainability, Energy, and Environment.

Its ambition is to become a leading school in Asia, advancing sustainable energy and environmental technologies through an interdisciplinary approach, with a particular focus on megacities like Hong Kong and their surrounding regions (ReThink HK^※).

"Megacity-focused" is SEE's most distinctive positioning — Hong Kong itself is a high-density, high-energy, high-emission metropolis whose energy and environmental problems (air, water, heat islands, energy consumption) are both typical and intractable. By anchoring its research in "sustainability for the megacity", SEE speaks directly to Hong Kong's realities while also addressing the shared challenges of the Greater Bay Area's urban cluster.

---

# 3. Three strategic research directions

According to publicly available information^※, SEE concentrates on three strategic areas:

1. Sustainable Technologies for Energy, Environment and Health — linking "energy–environment–health" and examining how technology can serve all three at once.
2. Urban Atmospheric and Aquatic Environment: science and policies — studying urban air and water, with "science" and "policy" deliberately placed side by side, signalling attention not just to technology but also to governance and policy.
3. Systems Approach to Smart and Healthy Cities: Nexus of Energy, Climate, and Environment — taking a "systems/nexus" perspective to study energy, climate and environment as an interwoven whole.

These three directions share a common trait: an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and the integration of "technology–policy–systems", rather than isolated single-technology breakthroughs — a fitting response to the inherent complexity of energy and environmental problems. The faculty's expertise spans climate change and air pollution, building and energy efficiency, innovative environmental treatment processes, waste-to-energy, renewable energy conversion and storage, energy management, and sustainable development policy and economics.

---

# 4. Leadership and three flagship research centres

SEE's current Dean is Professor Benjamin Horton — a Chair Professor of Earth Science who has studied sea-level change and climate science for over three decades. According to SEE's official welcome announcement^※, Horton joined in April 2025, having previously served as Director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore for more than four and a half years, and as Professor of Earth Science at Nanyang Technological University (AXA Chair in Natural Hazards and President's Chair in Earth Science). According to Eco-Business reporting^※, a key task entrusted to Horton at CityUHK is establishing a climate research centre; he is a recipient of the European Geosciences Union Plinius Medal and the American Geophysical Union Voyager Award. Having an internationally known sea-level scientist at the helm speaks to SEE's "megacity climate vulnerability" positioning — Hong Kong being a coastal metropolis directly exposed to sea-level rise risk.

Beneath the Dean, SEE houses three flagship research centres/laboratories, each with its own focus, forming the backbone of the School's research:

AERC is led by Prof. Michael Leung, who has taught at CityUHK since 2000, joined SEE as an Associate Professor in 2010, and was promoted to Professor in 2015. He currently holds the Sun Hung Kai Education and Charity Fund Professorship in Energy and Environment and a Chair Professorship in Renewable Energy. According to his SEE profile^※, his research has consistently placed him on Stanford University's "World's Top 2% Most-Cited Scientists" list and Clarivate's "Highly Cited Researchers" list.

JC STEM Lab is led by Prof. Zhiguo Yuan; its funding, according to his SEE profile^※, comes from The Hong Kong Jockey Club, and Yuan himself is a "Global STEM Professor" co-funded by the Innovation, Technology and Industry Bureau and the Education Bureau of the Hong Kong SAR Government. Before joining CityUHK in May 2023, he spent over two decades at the Advanced Water Management Centre at the University of Queensland, Australia, serving as its Director from 2015 to 2022 — bringing international urban water management research experience to Hong Kong's urban water systems.

The Hong Kong Institute for Clean Energy (HKICE) is another CityUHK "first in Hong Kong" following the "first energy and environment school" — according to CityUHK's official Nature Index announcement^※, CityUHK is the first university in Hong Kong to establish a clean energy research institute. The Institute is housed on the sixth floor of the Mong Man Wai Building on the Kowloon Tong campus, with research covering perovskite solar cells, energy storage and electrolysis, photonics and communications technologies, catalytic materials, and biomedical energy applications (for perovskite cell research in detail, see 04-research/perovskite-solar-cells.md). The division of labour among the three centres roughly tracks SEE's three strategic directions — AERC focuses on the technology front of "energy–environment–health", JC STEM Lab corresponds to "urban atmospheric and aquatic environment", and HKICE echoes the energy–climate nexus within "smart and healthy city systems".

---

# 5. Undergraduate programmes: four pathways

SEE's undergraduate offerings revolve around two degree streams, energy and environmental science and engineering, subdivided into four admissions pathways (according to CityUHK's mainland China admissions page^※ and the local admissions page^※):

In Year 1, students first complete shared foundation courses in mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry and biology before branching into their majors. The two BEng programmes (Energy Science and Engineering; Environmental Science and Engineering) are accredited by the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (HKIE)^※. At postgraduate level, SEE offers an MSc in Energy and Environment as well as MPhil and PhD research degrees.

---

# 6. Postgraduate funding and tuition

SEE's PhD/MPhil research degrees follow the University-wide funding framework (see programs.md); the public figures specific to SEE are:

PhD students must pass a qualifying examination within 10–24 months of enrolment^※, with a maximum of two attempts; applicants who graduated from institutions where English is not the medium of instruction must meet a minimum TOEFL score of 79 (internet-based) or an overall IELTS band of 6.5.

---

# 7. Recent achievements: world No. 1 in SDG 9, Hong Kong No. 1 in Nature Index clean energy, and young scholar awards

In the 2026 Times Higher Education Impact Rankings, CityUHK ranked first in the world in SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure); SEE is one of the core schools underpinning the result — a direct echo of its research positioning on "energy–environment–health" and "smart city systems".

The Nature Index clean energy ranking is another metric that quantifies SEE's contribution more directly. According to CityUHK's official announcement^※, the Nature Index 2025 "Energy Supplement" focused on SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), ranking institutions by SDG 7-related research output published in leading journals such as Nature and Science between 2019 and 2024 — CityUHK placed 25th globally and 1st in Hong Kong on the "Leading 200 institutions" list, and 9th globally and 1st in Hong Kong on the "50 rising institutions" list, the only Hong Kong university to appear on either. The announcement also noted that CityUHK academics published over 2,900 clean energy-related papers between 2019 and 2023, of which 564 clean energy papers were published between 2019 and 2024 in Nature Index-listed journals. CityUHK was the first university in Hong Kong to establish a dedicated energy and environment school and the first to establish a clean energy research institute (HKICE); the announcement explicitly cites these two "firsts" as institutional factors underpinning the ranking.

The announcement also disclosed a practical figure aligned with the "sustainable campus" agenda: CityUHK has installed nearly 2,000 high-efficiency bifacial solar panels across 30 buildings, cutting carbon emissions by approximately 450 tonnes annually — directly linking SEE's research positioning with CityUHK's own net-zero carbon campus drive (see 05-campus/architecture-and-sustainability.md), forming a closed loop of "school research + campus practice".

According to the honours listed on the School's official website, 21 SEE faculty members made the 2025 "World's Top 2% Most-Cited Scientists" list (Stanford University/Elsevier) — a notably dense output profile for a mid-sized specialist school. In June 2026, the School also held a joint research symposium with the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of Universitas Indonesia, one example of its expanding international academic network.

The School's early-career researchers have also been making their mark on international academic stages: according to public reporting, two SEE doctoral students, Dongxue Zheng and Yabi Huang, achieved strong results at the 10th Academic Forum on Hydrological Environment Simulation and Prediction (2026) — one reflection of the quality of the School's postgraduate training.

---

# 8. How SEE fits CityUHK's institutional character

• An early mover in emerging cross-disciplinary fields. SEE (2009), the School of Data Science (2018) and the College of Computing (2024; see 01-academics/college-of-computing-2024.md) form a consistent lineage, each embodying CityUHK's strategy of "establishing dedicated schools at the cross-disciplinary frontier". SEE went further still in 2025, recruiting an internationally renowned sea-level scientist as Dean — a continuation of that strategy at the talent-acquisition level.
• Echoing the sustainable campus. SEE's research and CityUHK's "net-zero carbon campus" and "solar/perovskite solar cell research" (see 05-campus/architecture-and-sustainability.md and 04-research/perovskite-solar-cells.md) complement each other as "research + practice" — the nearly 2,000 campus solar panels and the 450-tonne annual carbon reduction are the quantified expression of that complementarity.
• Serving the Greater Bay Area and national strategy. Energy and environmental research oriented towards megacities and their surrounding regions naturally aligns with the Greater Bay Area's coordinated development needs; the urban water management research hosted by the JC STEM Lab also speaks to Hong Kong's practical need to cope with extreme weather and urban flooding.
• Complementing the Faculty of Engineering's materials disciplines. SEE's perovskite solar cell research (HKICE) and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering (ranked first in Hong Kong in its discipline; see 01-academics/college-of-engineering-departments.md) reinforce each other at the materials–energy interface — a snapshot of CityUHK's disciplinary layout in which "strong materials and equally strong energy" go hand in hand.

---

# 9. Summary

• CityUHK's School of Energy and Environment (SEE) was established in July 2009, the first dedicated energy and environment school in Hong Kong^※; in April 2025 it welcomed sea-level scientist Prof. Benjamin Horton as Dean.
• Its positioning is oriented towards Hong Kong and other megacities and their surrounding regions, advancing sustainable energy and environmental technologies through interdisciplinary approaches, with the ambition of becoming a leading Asian school; its three strategic directions all stress interdisciplinarity and "technology–policy–systems" integration, operationalised respectively by the AERC, JC STEM Lab and HKICE.
• Undergraduate admissions offer four pathways spanning energy/environmental science and engineering majors and cross-disciplinary programmes with finance and sustainable business; postgraduate offerings comprise a full spectrum of MSc, MPhil and PhD degrees.
• CityUHK ranked first in the world in SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) in 2026, with SEE a core supporting school; in 2025 CityUHK ranked first in Hong Kong in the Nature Index "Energy Supplement" (25th globally), to which SEE was a major contributor, with 21 faculty members on the World's Top 2% Most-Cited Scientists list.

---