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In spite of its rapid economic development, China is faced with serious issues of resource shortage and environmental pollution. This paper is aimed at exploring the issues of resource shortage and environmental pollution in Chinese cities by means of efficiency evaluation. Through the Super-efficiency general directional distance function (GDDF) model, this paper calculates the urban efficiencies of resource-saving (UERS) of 197 Chinese cities from 2011 to 2015. Furthermore, considering the environmental problems, it applies the Super-efficiency GDDF model with undesirable outputs, and accesses the urban efficiencies containing environmental factors (UEEF). The empirical results are listed as follows. (1) Most of the Chinese cities exhibited comparatively low UERS and UEEF, indicating great potential for the reduction of resource consumption and environmental pollution; (2) Those groups with higher levels of resource-saving efficiency tend to have poorer environmental efficiency. This means that many cities achieve good economic performance at the expense of the environment; (3) In order to realize the sustainable economic and social development, we should not only save resources, but also reduce the emission of pollutants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wind power is a type of clean and renewable energy, and reasonable utilization of wind power is beneficial to environmental protection and economic development. Therefore, a short-term hydro-thermal-wind economic emission dispatching (SHTW-EED) problem is presented in this paper. The proposed problem aims to distribute the load among hydro, thermal and wind power units to simultaneously minimize economic cost and pollutant emission. To solve the SHTW-EED problem with complex constraints, a modified gravitational search algorithm based on the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-III (MGSA-NSGA-III) is proposed. In the proposed MGSA-NSGA-III, a non-dominated sorting approach, reference-point based selection mechanism and chaotic mutation strategy are applied to improve the evolutionary process of the original gravitational search algorithm (GSA) and maintain the distribution diversity of Pareto optimal solutions. Moreover, a parallel computing strategy is introduced to improve the computational efficiency. Finally, the proposed MGSA-NSGA-III is applied to a typical hydro-thermal-wind system to verify its feasibility and effectiveness. The simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm can obtain low economic cost and small pollutant emission when dealing with the SHTW-EED problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Establishing an equal and effective emissions trading system is a long-term strategy to promote sustainable environmental protection and stronger economic growth. Due to regional divergences in economic development, resource endowment and geographical CO 2 emissions space, this paper focuses on a comprehensive emissions reduction allocation solution based on the Shapley value method and estimating economic welfare effects through interregional emissions trading in China. Our empirical results verify that the Shapley value-based allocation criterion is an equal and effective emissions reduction target allocation. The Eastern and Southern coast, and the Northeastern and Middle Yellow River regions are the main emissions permit buyers, and they incur windfall economic losses because of greater marginal abatement cost, while the Southwest, Northwest, Northern coast and Middle Yangtze River regions are the main emissions permit sellers, and they earn windfall economic benefits because of the emissions reduction potential of energy-intensive industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]