Search

The implementation of green development has become an important choice for countries seeking the harmonious development of the economy and the environment. The National Ecological Civilization Pilot Zone is an innovative institutional mechanism for exploring green development in China. This study utilizes the National Ecological Civilization Pilot Zone policy as a quasi-natural experiment. Adopting data from 290 prefecture-level and above cities in China during 2014–2019 as the research object, this study matches the propensity score and improved differences-in-differences to assess the impact of green development mechanism innovation on regional total-factor environmental efficiency. The results show that this innovation had a significant impact on the improvement of total-factor environmental efficiency. Compared with non-pilot cities, the implementation of pilot zone areas contributed 16.78% to the growth of total-factor environmental efficiency in the experimental group cities. In addition, further analysis shows that mechanism innovation is more effective in areas with high pollution and high resource consumption. This study enriches the research on evaluation of the impact of innovation in green development mechanisms and provides a reference for further promoting pilot national ecological civilization zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vegetation serves as a habitat for various wildlife species, provides crucial ecosystem services to society, and plays a critical role in regulating the global climate [[1]]. Lastly, in the study by Wang et al. (2022) [[9]], the authors examined the spatiotemporal characteristics and influencing factors of the seasonal ecosystem water-use efficiency of various vegetation types in Inner Mongolia from 2001 to 2020. The two other articles in this SI focused on the response of vegetation to the environment from both individual species [[8]] and spatial [[9]] perspectives, respectively. [Extracted from the article]

At the city scale, the diurnal and seasonal variations in the relationship between urban form and the urban heat island effect remains poorly understood. To address this deficiency, we conducted an empirical study based on data from 150 cities in the Jing-Jin-Ji region of China from 2000 to 2015. The results derived from multiple regression models show that the effects of urban geometric complexity, elongation, and vegetation on urban heat island effect differ among different seasons and between day and night. The impacts of urban geometric factors and population density in summer, particularly those during the daytime, are significantly larger than those in winter. The influence of urban area and night light intensity is greater in winter than in summer and is greater during the day than at night. The effect of NDVI is greater in summer during the daytime. Urban vegetation is the factor with the greatest relative contribution during the daytime, and urban size is the dominant factor at night. Urban geometry is the secondary dominant factor in summer, although its contribution in winter is small. The relative contribution of urban geometry shows an upward trend at a decadal time scale, while that of vegetation decreases correspondingly. The results provide a valuable reference for top-level sustainable urban planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization brings significant changes to the urban food system. There is growing attention to food self-sufficiency in metropolitan areas for the concern of greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation in food transportation. In China, grain self-sufficiency in metropolitan areas is also an important issue for grain security and involves coordination among contradictory policy goals. Based upon a comprehensive statistical analysis of 70 metropolitan areas in mainland China, we investigated the regional differences in the trends of grain self-sufficiency capacity in these areas from 1990 to 2015. The findings show a trend of decline in 3/4 of metropolitan areas, mainly located in the rapidly urbanizing eastern coastal areas and in the West. The increase of self-sufficiency mainly occurred in the North, in areas either specialized in grain production or originally low in grain self-sufficiency. The enlarging contradiction of decreasing supply and rising demand explained the sharp decrease in self-sufficiency, while the increase in self-sufficiency was due to the increase in supply. Land productivity contributed more significantly than land availability to supply change. There was a tradeoff between urban expansion (rather than economic growth) and grain production in metropolitan areas. Our results provide implications to future research and policy-making for grain production management in China's metropolitan areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]