Search

Haze pollution is a key obstacle for environmental management faced by China and many other developing countries. The survey on residential families' economic losses and willingness to pay (WTP) are regarded as an essential reference for the implementation of environmental policies for haze treatment. For Jiangsu province of China, the authors of this paper first conducted three qualitative interviews with respectively meteorologists, meteorological administrators, and residents, a questionnaire was then elaborately designed, and subsequent surveys of 1123 families were administered in Jiangsu province. Further, the authors investigated measurements of direct economic losses by using the contingent valuation method (CVM) and explored influential factors of WTP by utilizing the binary logistic regression. From this survey, the estimated total economic loss incurred by haze disasters and total treatment cost for haze-related diseases were respectively 22.38 billion (in RMB) and 8.4 billion for Jiangsu province. 55.9% of residential families were willing to pay 11.6 billion RMB annually (51.97% of total loss) for haze treatment, leaving a shortage of 11.05 billion RMB, which the government is responsible to pay. These findings provide empirical information reflecting the opinions of communities and residential families, useful for the governments and industrial sectors to design environmental policies to meet the requirements of the public and control environmental pollution in an effective way to achieve sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A novel method that achieves optimal allocation efficiency is proposed. • Our novel method can lead to less economic losses of cities in China. • The deprivation coefficient per capita was used for the fairness of the method. • A case study on 27 polluted cities with high homogeneity in China is conducted. Rational allocation of pollutant emission rights is one of the ways to promote the sustainable economy and environment of cities. Based on the overall goal of emission reduction in the 13th Five-Year Plan proposed by China, the Yangtze River Delta city agglomeration with high homogeneity is selected as the research object, and three allocation models of SO 2 emission rights are established using data envelopment analysis (DEA), shadow price and information entropy. The fairness of the three allocation schemes is evaluated by the per capita relative deprivation coefficient (RDC). The study shows that: (1) the three-objective information entropy allocation model takes into account the principles of maximum output-input efficiency, protection of regional GDP and scheme fairness, and the relative deprivation coefficients (RDCs) are all less than 0.5, which can be used as the best scheme for SO 2 emission rights allocation in the Yangtze River Delta city agglomeration. (2) Cities in Jiangsu province need to reduce SO 2 emissions. (3) Taking city agglomerations with high homogeneity as the research object has more practical significance, which can provide policy advice for sustainable development of similar city agglomerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]