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Collaborative environmental governance (CEG) is increasingly advocated to address the environmental risk issues in the integrated development of urban agglomerations. Constructing an effective CEG network from the perspective of interdependent multilevel network plays a vital role in promoting the environmental governance of urban agglomerations. To investigate the structure characteristics and formation mechanism of CEG network, this paper takes the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration as the research area, and employes the social network analysis and Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) methods to analyze the CEG network, which consists of the collaborative network of cities, relationship network of topics, and affiliation network connecting cities to topics. Research results show that the CEG level in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration continues to improve, while the CEG network is still not in a tightly connected state. For the collaborative network of cities, it presents the small world characteristics and forms a cooperative trend of "central-subcentral-peripheral city."For the relationship network of topics, the evolution of environmental governance topics is characterized by "from aspect to point." For the affiliation network connecting cities to topics, as the diversity of environmental governance topics increases among cities, cities within the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration tend to share the similar topics. In addition, the interactive triangular structures, star structures, open triangular structures and closed triangular structures in the network can promote the formation of new cooperative relationships in CEG network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protoporphyrin IX (PpIX) is a photosensitizer used in photodynamic therapy, however, its poor aqueous solubility always presents challenges and limits its application. To solve these problems water‐soluble derivatives of PpIX were synthesized by esterification with polyethylene glycol, and polymerization of the PpIX diol with hexamethylene diisocyanate to form a water‐soluble polyurethane. The polyurethane PpIX derivatives were characterized and showed high levels of singlet oxygen generation. The photodynamic antibacterial activity of the PpIX derivatives were explored on Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus and methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus aureus indicated that 100% antibacterial killing was achieved with a concentration of 40 μM upon 405 nm irradiation for 5 min. The polyurethane showed high biocompatibility in the dark with a variety of cell lines, but when exposed to 405 nm light (for 5 min) cytotoxic singlet oxygen was generated, resulting in cell death. Importantly, this was also possible with 635 nm illumination. In summary this novel protoporphyrin polyurethane overcomes the issues of solubility, and offers enhanced killing (singlet oxygen) generation with the potential to be used in photodynamic therapy for both antibacterial and anticancer treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Correct purchase decisions are required for the successful implementation of government procurement of public services (GPPS). Based on the limitations of decision variables in a single dimension, we consider multiple environments and propose purchasing decision variables from three dimensions: service characteristics, government capability, and environmental factors. By collecting data on decision variables from cases of government purchasing and cases of government providing services, a purchase decision model is constructed based on the random forest algorithm to help governments decide between purchasing public services and providing services. The results indicate that the decision model that considers the three dimensions has better prediction accuracy than the one that only considers service characteristics. Moreover, the results of the importance of the decision variables indicate that the financial capacity and administrative level of the government, and economic environment have a significant impact on the purchase decision of the government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of quality problems in government procurement of elderly care services, mastering relationships between quality‐influencing factors and identifying key factors is beneficial for managers to make correct quality control decisions. From the complex networks' perspective, quality‐influencing factors of government purchasing elderly care services are obtained by case analysis, and the influencing factors' network topology is constructed. Importance indexes of nodes are determined with complex network theory, and multi‐indexes are fused by the Pythagoras TOPSIS to evaluate the importance of each factor. The results reveal key factors in the quality of government procurement of elderly care services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Under the background of population aging in China, the demand for older-adult care services and products is growing, and the older-adult care industry has great development prospects. A sound older-adult care policy system, that is, an effective policy tool mix, plays an important role in improving the sustainable development of older-adult care industry., Materials and Methods: Based on older-adult care policy documents from 31 Chinese provinces, this research extracts older-adult care policy tools via text mining. Then extracted policy tools are taken as conditional variables, and the development of older-adult care industry, which is manifested by the number of older-adult care companies across 31 regions is taken as the result variable. Through applying qualitative comparative analysis, the combined effect of different policy tools on the development of older-adult care industry is obtained., Results and Discussions: Results show that a single policy tool cannot constitute the necessary condition to facilitate the older-adult care industry. Hence, policy tools should be applied in combination. Five sustainable policy tool mixes which can promote the development of older-adult care industry are summarized, namely supporting policy-driven mode, fiscal and tax support mode led by supply-oriented policy tools, double-team mode driven by fiscal and tax support and the consumer market, multi-subject joint force mode, and technology compensation mode. The overall findings of this study imply that exploring the policy tool combinations is of vital importance to the sustainable development of older-adult care industry., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Zhang, Lu, Zhu and Zhang.)

In recent years, Shandong Province became one of China's largest carbon emitters; however, existing studies failed to capture the recent trends and the key driving factors behind it at the city level. In this study, we computed the city-level CO 2 emission by employing accounting methods and Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) to provide a holistic picture and measure the contributing factors CO 2 emissions across 16 cities in Shandong Province during 2010-2018. Research outcomes indicate that Shandong's CO 2 emissions showed an increasing trend during 2010-2018, except in 2013. Shandong Province's GDP per capita and population size promote energy-related CO 2 emissions from 2010 to 2018. Energy intensity is the main driving force behind Shandong's significant CO 2 emission growth, followed by the energy consumption structure. Emission intensity and regional structure partly offset the CO 2 emission increase. Industrial structure is the most important driving factor in reducing emissions; however, its emission reduction effect is not stable in some cities and sectors, especially for the nonmetal and metal industry, petroleum and chemical industry, and energy sector. Dongying is the top emitter across Shandong from 2010 to 2018. Its emissions mainly come from the petroleum and chemical industry. The largest driving factors are the energy intensity and industrial structure. Investigating CO 2 emissions at the city level yields a strong recommendation that Shandong Province's regions cooperate to improve development patterns., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)