ALBERT

Description: As the largest solid waste (SW) generator in the world, China is facing serious pollution issues induced by increasing quantities of SW. The sustainability assessment of SW management is very important for designing relevant policy for further improving the overall efficiency of solid waste management (SWM). By focusing on industrial solid waste (ISW) and municipal solid waste (MSW), the paper investigated the sustainability performance of SWM by applying decoupling analysis, and further identified the main drivers of SW change in China by adopting Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) model. The results indicate that China has made a great achievement in SWM which was specifically expressed as the increase of ISW utilized amount and harmless disposal ratio of MSW, decrease of industrial solid waste discharged (ISWD), and absolute decoupling of ISWD from economic growth as well. However, China has a long way to go to achieve the goal of sustainable management of SW. The weak decoupling, even expansive negative decoupling of ISW generation and MSW disposal suggests that China needs timely technology innovation and rational institutional arrangement to reduce SW intensity from the source and promote classification and recycling. The factors of investment efficiency and technology are the main determinants of the decrease in SW, inversely, economic growth has increased SW discharge. The effects of investment intensity showed a volatile trend over time but eventually decreased SW discharged. Moreover, the factors of population and industrial structure slightly increased SW.

Description: China is the largest CO2 emitter in the world and is still reliant on energy consumption for economic growth. Research has focused on effective approaches of reducing and mitigating CO2 emissions. This paper undertakes a decomposition study of energy-related CO2 emissions from the industrial and household sectors during the period 1996–2012, with the objectives of investigating trends of the changes in energy-related CO2 emissions, the driving forces of these changes, and approaches of mitigating CO2 emission. Results show the following: (1) the expansion of economic activity is the dominant stimulatory factor of the increase of CO2 emissions in China and that a sustained increase in CO2 emissions can be expected; (2) the decline in energy intensity and the adjustment of energy mix and industrial structure effectively mitigate CO2 emissions; and (3) the government should give more attention to enhancing the energy utility efficiency and reducing CO2 emissions in rural households.

Description: This paper analyzed the characteristic of the tourism destination ecosystem from perspective of entropy in Dunhuang City. Given these circumstances, an evaluation index system that considers the potential of sustainable development was formed based on dissipative structure and entropy change for the tourism destination ecosystem. The sustainable development potential evaluation model for tourism destination ecosystem was built up based on information entropy. Then, we analyzed each indicator impact for the sustainable development potential and proposed some measures for the tourism destination ecosystem. The conclusions include: (a) the requirements of Dunhuang tourism destination ecosystem on the natural ecosystem continuously grew between 2000 and 2012; (b) The sustainable development potential of the Dunhuang tourism destination ecosystem was on an oscillation upward trend during the study period, which is dependent on government attention, and pollution problems were improved.

Description: Integrated analysis on socio-economic metabolism could provide a basis for understanding and optimizing regional sustainability. The paper conducted socio-economic metabolism analysis by means of the emergy accounting method coupled with data envelopment analysis and decomposition analysis techniques to assess the sustainability of Qingyang city and its eight sub-region system, as well as to identify the major driving factors of performance change during 2000–2007, to serve as the basis for future policy scenarios. The results indicate that Qingyang greatly depended on non-renewable emergy flows and feedback (purchased) emergy flows, except the two sub-regions, named Huanxian and Huachi, which highly depended on renewable emergy flow. Zhenyuan, Huanxian and Qingcheng were identified as being relatively emergy efficient, and the other five sub-regions have potential to reduce natural resource inputs and waste output to achieve the goal of efficiency. The results of decomposition analysis show that the economic growth, as well as the increased emergy yield ratio and population not accompanied by a sufficient increase of resource utilization efficiency are the main drivers of the unsustainable economic model in Qingyang and call for polices to promote the efficiency of resource utilization and to optimize natural resource use.

Description: Unprecedented economic achievement in China has occurred along with rising resource consumption and waste productions levels. The goal of sustainability requires the decoupling of economic growth from resource consumption (resource decoupling) and environmental degradation (impact decoupling). For this paper, the performances of resource decoupling (energy and water) and impact decoupling (wastewater, SO2 and CO2) in China were evaluated, and the spatial pattern and temporal trend of decoupling performance were investigated by using the rescaled range analysis (R/S). The results indicate the following. (1) The performance of resource decoupling during the investigated period is worse than that of traditional impact (SO2 and wastewater) decoupling, but better than that of the CO2 emission. Additionally, the decoupling performances of energy consumption and related pollutant emission (except CO2) are better than that of water usage and wastewater discharge; (2) The decoupling performance of energy consumption, SO2 and CO2, has substantially improved from the 10th Five-Year Planning Period (FYP) (2001–2005) to the 11th FYP (2006–2010), which indicates that the decoupling performance is highly related the environmental policy; (3) The spatial disparities of the performance of resource and impact decoupling are declining, which indicates the existence of cross-province convergence in decoupling performance; (4) The decoupling performance of SO2 and water usage in most of regions shows an improving trend. Inversely, the decoupling performance of energy consumption, CO2 emission, and wastewater discharge in most regions show a decreasing trend; (5) China needs more stringent water-saving targets and wastewater discharge standards; better policy efforts to improve the water recycling level both in agricultural, industrial and municipal level are required to prevent the decreasing trend of the decoupling performance.

Description: Household energy consumption has been a major contributor to the increase in global energy demand and carbon emission, and the household sector has also become one of the most crucial factors shaping the management of developments towards sustainability. However, there is still a knowledge gap regarding the household energy consumption in China. Due to the vast territory and the differences among regional conditions, it is critical to conduct a systemic review to illustrate the overall situation as well as the detailed mechanisms of the household energy consumption in China. By employing both qualitative and quantitative methods, two key features of the household energy consumption in China are presented; one is regarding the total amount and the structure of the household energy consumption, and the second is the significant urban-rural gap. The driving forces are investigated from the perspective of external determinants and internal determinants, which consist of seven key factors; finally, the transition roadmap towards the sustainable energy system for the household level are presented based on the text analysis from the four key policy documents. Weaknesses in the current research on the energy geography of household level also exist, such as the lack of single factor research and the lack of integration and comprehensive analysis. Therefore, future studies need to strengthen the research of regional household energy consumption structure, spatial-temporal process, and its motivation mechanism, and sustainable development of energy, so as to explore space-social structure of household energy consumption and spatial-temporal interaction.

Description: Eco-efficiency is a tool for sustainability analysis that indicates how to carry out economic activities effectively. This paper assesses agricultural eco-efficiency using data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the Theil index approach. Using basic data of 31 provinces in China during 2003–2013, we analyzed the agricultural eco-efficiency development level and spatial pattern in China. The results show that the agricultural eco-efficiency of only four provinces has been relatively efficient in the entire study period, namely, Zhejiang, Hainan, Chongqing, and Tibet. The results also show that agricultural eco-efficiency was higher mainly in south of the Qinling Mountains-Huaihe River Line and north of the Yangtze River area, that agricultural eco-efficiency is mainly affected by pure technical efficiency, and that highly efficient areas are mainly concentrated in the densely populated areas, i.e., the economic developed areas (except Tibet). The Theil index results show that the agricultural eco-efficiency difference weakened between provinces in China, as did western and northeast regions, but eastern and central regions show a slight upward trend.

Description: Sustainability, Vol. 10, Pages 2569: Economic Growth and Pollution Emission in China: Structural Path Analysis Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su10072569 Authors: Na Yang Zilong Zhang Bing Xue Junxia Ma Xingpeng Chen Chenyu Lu The relationship between economic growth and environmental pollution has long been a controversial topic. However, simply the detection of the existence of environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) is not enough to understand how economic growth induced environmental pollution. This study investigated the path and mechanism of the effect of economic growth on the emission of two types of environmental pollutants, that is, industrial smoke and dust and sulfur dioxide, by using a structural equation model and a sample of 283 prefecture-level cities in China in 2005 and 2015. The research results show that economic growth exerted both direct and indirect effects on the emission of the two environmental pollutants. In addition to a direct impact through the economic scale effect, economic growth also indirectly impacted the two environmental pollutants emissions through three mediators, that is, industrial structure, technological innovations and environmental regulations. For different pollutants, the effect paths of economic growth on their emission showed both similarities and differences. First, with regards to industrial smoke and dust emissions and sulfur dioxide emissions, the effects of economic growth on the amount of these two emissions through environmental regulations and the industrial structure were negative inhibitory effects and positive promoting effects, respectively. This means that in prefectural-level cities in China, environmental regulation factors have produced some effects in reducing the emissions of these two pollutants while the industrial structure (level of industrialization) can increase the emissions of these two pollutants. However, the effect strength of these two paths shows a gradual weakening. Second, these two paths differ in effect strength and its changes. The positive promoting effects of the industrial structure on pollutant emission are significantly higher than the inhibitory effects of environmental regulation. In addition, our study also found that the direct impact path of economic growth on environmental pollution also passed significance testing, particularly in 2015. This shows that other reasons affect pollutant emission, such as system factors, spatial migration of industries and so forth.

Description: Cross-city convergence in green space coverage could contribute to our understanding of the law of motion of distribution dynamics of environmental sustainability across cities and provide crucial information for designing policies regarding complex processes relating to human–environment interactions in an urban system. The relationship between socioeconomic factors and green space coverage has been widely discussed, but research on the distribution dynamics of green space coverage across cities is limited. This paper explored the pattern of convergence in green space coverage of a group of 285 Chinese cities over the period of 2002–2012 by using hybrid approaches, including the nonparametric estimation technique, unconditional β-convergence model, and conditional β-convergence model. The results indicated that the green space coverage level in most cities has been substantially improved; the spatial disparity across Chinese cities has shrunk, and the level of green space coverage has converged to 104% of the average level. The β-convergence estimation results demonstrate the existence of unconditional and conditional convergence in green space coverage among Chinese cities, which indicates that cities with a low initial level of green space coverage grow faster than those with an initial high level. Faster sprawling, more compact and wealthier cities are likely to converge to a higher level of green space coverage. Expansion of the population and spatial scale of cities contributes to increasing green space coverage, sprawling of built-up area leads to a decrease of the green space coverage, and economic growth has little impact on green space coverage.

Description: The vegetation response to climatic factors is a hot topic in global change research. With the Support of ArcGIS and ENVI software, six sets of Landsat remote sensing images of the middle and lower reaches of the Shule River Basin were interpreted. Eight types of land use and land covers were obtained and the spatiotemporal characteristics of the land use/land cover changes (LUCCs) were analyzed using an intensity analysis to provide a basis for decision-making on the sustainable development of the basin. In the past 29 years, the area of cropland, construction land and shrubland had a net increase, while high-coverage grassland (HCG), medium-coverage grassland (MCG), low-coverage grassland (LCG), wetland and non-vegetation land all presented a net decrease. The area of artificial vegetation (cropland) presented an expanding trend and increased by 1105.56 km2 in total, while the natural vegetation (grassland, shrubland, wetland) showed a shrinking tendency and decreased by 917.69 km2. The intensity analysis revealed that the rate of LUCC in the period of 2000~2006 and 2006~2010 was relatively higher, although the rate of LUCC in other periods was much lower. The change intensities of MCG and HCG were greatest, followed by LCG, shrubland and wetland. Construction land and cropland were in third place, while non-vegetation land was in last place. The pattern of regional LUCC was generally stable except for cropland loss and the gain/loss change of other land-use/land-cover types was always in an active state. For spatial distribution, few changes were observed in the old irrigated area within the oasis. The LUCC was mainly concentrated in the oasis fringe area, natural vegetation cover area and emigrant arrangement regions.