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Decoupling economic growth from CO2 emissions is imperative for China. Meanwhile, establishing a consistent and comprehensive decoupling inventory that includes national (N), regional and provincial (RP), and city and county (CC) levels is essential for further policy formulation. This research aims to investigate the decoupling status using the "N-RP-CC" approach while considering changes in decoupling trends at the different levels. A combination of the Tapio decoupling model and cluster analysis is employed to study the decoupling's spatiotemporal characteristics and trends. The study first calculates the decoupling value for "national, 7; regions, 30; provinces, 1501 CCs" in China, 2006–2017. The results show that there continues to be an improvement in the decoupling trend at the national level. Conversely, the regional scale exhibits a more vulnerable decoupling trend compared to the national level, with weak and extended negative decoupling observed in northeastern and northern China. Moreover, provincial heterogeneities are increasingly evident, with poor decoupling statuses appearing in Jilin, Heilongjiang, Liaoning, and Xinjiang, as well as many central provinces. Additionally, although more than half of CCs exhibit weak decoupling during most years, seven different states of decoupling were also identified during the time frame. These findings further indicate that spatiotemporal heterogeneities extend beyond RP scales within CCs. Taking the Yangtze River as a boundary line reveals a severe situation in northern areas along with rapid development trends observed in southern regions. Finally, we clustered 1414 CCs based on their industrial proportions for 2017 which further highlights increasingly prominent heterogeneities that should be carefully considered. Based on these findings, policy recommendations such as spatial organization and optimization and technique investment are proposed to achieve CO2 emission decoupling under the N-RP-CC levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Atmospheric environmental quality significantly influences the environment of people's life and the development of modern society. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to accurately assess atmospheric environmental quality. Firstly, we propose and analyze two indicator systems for atmospheric environmental quality assessment, that is, 1) the standard air pollution index, and 2) an index system which covers different types of influencing factors related to air quality. In particular, the proposed index system is made up of seven parts, that is, 1) Climate and meteorology, 2) Economic and social development, 3) Industrial structure, 4) Energy consumption, 5) Industrial pollutant discharge, 6) The greening of the city, and 7) Environmental protection construction. Secondly, we propose a hybrid AHP-Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation Model to evaluate the atmospheric environmental quality. In the hybrid model, AHP is used to calculate the weight coefficient of the index system, and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model is exploited to describe the vagueness of remark in the evaluation process. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that using the proposed index system, the hybrid AHP-Fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model is able to assess air quality more accurately than the modified API. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advanced core-shelled material with a high specific area has been considered as an effective material to remove heavy metal from aqueous solutions. A core-shelled Fe3O4@C hybrid nanoparticle aggregates with environmental-friendly channel in the study. Moreover, the higher exposure of adsorption sites can be achieved for the special configuration that higher Brunauer-Emmet-Teller (BET) surface area reaches up to 238.18 m2 g−1. Thus, a more efficiently heavy metal ion removal is obtained, Pb (II), Cd (II), Cu (II), and Cr (VI) up to 100, 99.2, 96.6, and 94.8%, respectively. In addition, the products are easy to be separated from the aqueous solutions after adsorption, due to the relative large submicrometer size and the enhanced external magnetic fields introduced by the iron-based cores. We provide an ideal mode to remove heavy metal ions using core-shelled Fe3O4@C under the water treatment condition. A new approach is clarified that core-shell nano/micro-functional materials can be synthesized well on large scales which are used in many fields such as environmental remediation, catalyst, and energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]