The Impact of Severe Air Pollution in January 2013 in Beijing on Sustained Elevation of Public Environmental Concern

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Schwabe

Abstract Harmful and sudden events trigger intense media coverage which in turn can elevate public interest in a problem within an instant. A period of heavy air pollution in Beijing in January 2013 may have been such a case. This sudden and intense period of air pollution featured historically high levels of fine particulate concentrations and was assumed by observers to be a trigger for shifting public perception and increased pressure for policy adjustment. This study examines whether this period of severe air pollution indeed triggered increased public scrutiny, following which the influential factors behind this development are outlined. In this context, a focus is given to the interplay of air quality, media reporting and public discussion in shaping sustained public interest. Based on a timeline analysis and survey data, it is argued that the combination of historically high air pollution with intense media reporting did lead to higher public attention to the topic.

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. H. Sandford

Recent developments in remote imaging equipment carried on satellites have given the scientific community a vast amount of new information about the Sun and its atmosphere. Media coverage of the remarkable discoveries accompanied by impressive images of the Sun's atmosphere, and linkage to the loss of a television satellite over the United States, have focused public attention on the existence and effects of the Solar Wind. This paper sets out to illustrate the impact of the Solar Wind on radio aids to navigation, and to look at the possible effects on present and proposed systems.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
Mohammad Taherdangkoo ◽  
Beikpour Mona ◽  
Kamran Ghasemi

Purpose This paper aims to highlight a model of industry drivers (industries’ environmental reputation and competitive intensity) that affect the sustainability marketing strategy segmentation, targeting and positioning based on customers’ environmental concern and explore the circumstances under which such a strategy affects performance. Design/methodology/approach The authors examined 64 Iranian export companies, which adopted sustainability marketing strategies across seven different industries. Achieved data are analyzed using a structural equation model methodology. Findings The results indicate that industries’ environmental reputation is positively related to the sustainability marketing strategies based on customers’ environmental concern and leads to superior financial and market performance. They also posit that competitive intensity has no significant effect on sustainability marketing strategies. Research limitations/implications This study specifically examines the impact of industry drivers on sustainability marketing strategy and performance. Logically, there might be other factors affecting the sustainability or other value dimensions that are not addressed in this study. Practical implications This paper provides some understanding of how organizations strength their sustainability marketing strategy, and they have to consider what factors to adopt such strategy. This paper also facilitates a better understanding of the customers’ needs and concern as a factor influencing sustainability marketing strategy adoption and implementation. Identifying the customer segmentation and market targeting based on the industry’s environmental can lead to the business will normally tailor the marketing mix (4Ps) with the needs and expectations of the target in mind. Originality/value This paper strengthens the effect of environmental concern of customer to understand what influences the success of the sustainability marketing adoption and implementation by investigating the most influential factors such as industries’ environmental reputation and competitive intensity.


Author(s):  
Mei Yang ◽  
Hong Fan ◽  
Kang Zhao

Aiming at improving the air quality and protecting public health, policies such as restricting factories, motor vehicles, and fireworks have been widely implemented. However, fine-grained spatiotemporal analysis of these policies’ effectiveness is lacking. This paper collected the hourly meteorological and PM2.5 data for three typical emission scenarios in Hubei, Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei (BTH), and Yangtze River Delta (YRD). Then, this study simulated the PM2.5 concentration under the same meteorological conditions and different emission scenarios based on a reliable hourly spatiotemporal random forest model ( R 2 exceeded 0.84). Finally, we investigated the fine-grained spatiotemporal impact of restricting factories, vehicles, and fireworks on PM2.5 concentrations from the perspective of hours, days, regions, and land uses, excluding meteorological interference. On average, restricting factories and vehicles reduced the PM2.5 concentration at 02:00, 08:00, 14:00, and 20:00 by 18.57, 16.22, 25.00, and 19.07 μ g / m 3 , respectively. Spatially, it had the highest and quickest impact on Hubei, with a 27.05 μ g / m 3 decrease of PM2.5 concentration and 17 day lag to begin to show significant decline. This was followed by YRD, which experienced a 23.52 μ g / m 3 decrease on average and a 23 day lag. BTH was the least susceptible; the PM2.5 concentration decreased by only 8.2 μ g / m 3 . In addition, influenced by intensive human activities, the cultivated, urban, and rural lands experienced a larger decrease in PM2.5 concentration. These empirical results revealed that restricting factories, vehicles, and fireworks is effective in alleviating air pollution and the effect showed significant spatiotemporal heterogeneity. The policymakers should further investigate influential factors of hourly PM2.5 concentrations, combining with local geographical and social environment, and implement more effective and targeted policies to improve local air quality, especially for BTH and the air quality at morning and night.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles Chandler

This study aims to identify factors that shape public perception and emotional response to mass shootings in the United States. I suggest that patterns of media coverage inform public consciousness and collective emotion. Newsworthiness and gatekeeping theories assert that school or prejudicial shootings and those with more victims are reported on at higher rates. Literature on racial and immigrant bias in media demonstrates that non-white shooters also generate more discourse. The directed construction of shootings and the affective public responses they generate align well with the concept of a “moral panic.” Using all valid cases from the Mother Jones Mass Shootings:1982-2019 dataset which align temporally with Google Trends data, I analyze the volume and decay rate of search topics “mass shooting,” “gun control,” and “open carry,” following US mass shootings from 2004-2019. Shootings with more victims predict a higher volume of searches for “mass shooting,” and shorter search periods for “gun control” and “open carry.” Shootings with educational and religious targets had no significant effects on search patterns. Workplace shootings result in longer search periods for “mass shooting,” and shorter periods for “gun control.” Non-white shooters generate shorter search decay for “open carry.” The results support theories of media gatekeeping, suggesting events with more casualties generate more intense public attention. The consistent negative correlation between search volume and decay length suggests that sensational responses to shootings are not sustainable over long periods of time and prohibit pragmatically addressing mass shootings.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephane M Shepherd ◽  
Benjamin L Spivak

The involvement in crime of some young Sudanese-born Victorians has received sustained public attention in recent years. The media coverage of these occurrences has been extensive, with some outlets criticised for sensationalist reporting and prejudiced undertones. A range of views were held across the commentariat including, for example, the notion that Sudanese-Victorian criminal involvement has been overstated; that some level of justice over-representation was inevitable due to the demographics of Sudanese-born Victorians, which skew young and male (i.e. the demographic hypothesis); and that offending rates may be associated with heightened law enforcement responses following a high-profile criminal incident in March 2016 that received protracted media coverage and political commentary (i.e. the racial-profiling hypothesis). This paper sought to address these contentions by (i) examining the offending rates of both young and adult males across three cultural sub-groups (i.e. Sudanese-born, Indigenous Australian, Australian-born) across several offending categories between 2015 and 2018 and (ii) exploring the impact of a high-profile criminal incident in March 2016, on the offending rates of Sudanese-born Victorians. Offending rates were calculated using offender incident data from the Victorian Crime Statistics Agency and population estimates from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data. Findings indicate that Sudanese-born individuals figure prominently in both youth and adult offending categories relative to other major cultural sub-groups. Rates for ‘crimes against the person’ were especially pronounced for Sudanese-born youth and significantly higher than rates for crimes more subject to police discretion (i.e. public order offences). The ‘demographic hypothesis’ did not hold for the specified age range of 10 to 17 years. An increase in offending was observed post-March 2016 across two offending categories for Sudanese-born Victorians. Findings are contextualised within.


2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Geist

AbstractMany countries find their information and digital policies still dominated by traditional stakeholders, particularly the content industry, major telecom companies, and marketing groups, yet Canada has experienced a notable shift in perspective with a strong and influential public interest voice. This shift toward public interest and participation in the development of Canadian information and digital policies has led to legislation, regulation, and policy outcomes that once seemed highly unlikely. This Article seeks to better understand the changing role of the public in Canadian information and digital policymaking by framing the developments as an ongoing policy development process featuring a series of closely linked changes and responses. The emergence of public participation on information and digital policy issues occurred across a spectrum of issues, yet the traits were strikingly similar: grassroots efforts reliant on social media and the Internet to capture media and public attention and focus it on consumer perspectives, minimal interest from government and regulators; and initial dismissal giving way to hostility from incumbent stakeholders. The Article identifies some of the reasons behind the shift, including the growing importance of information and digital policies, the impact of digital advocacy tools, and the shifting policy pyramid in which users have now largely leapfrogged corporate interests as policy influencers. While the shift does not mean the public interest wins on every issue, it does suggest an important change in influence with long-term ramifications for the development of information and digital policy in Canada that others may seek to emulate.


JURIST ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 46-50
Author(s):  
Yulia D. Syubaeva ◽  

Due to the development of industrial property, the emergence of new enterprises, a large number of legal entities engaged in business activities, there is an acute problem of proper legal protection of the interests of persons exposed to negative influence from these subjects. The lack of uniformity of judicial practice in this area indicates a lack of legislative elaboration of relations between neighbors, which or one of which is a legal entity engaged in negative activities associated, as a rule, with air pollution, noise, light, energy and other effects. When resolving such disputes, the courts take into account many factors, including: the presence or absence of public interest in the activities of the enterprise, the severity of the impact, etc. However, these grounds may be applied and interpreted by the courts in different ways. This scientific article is devoted to the analysis of the most problematic situations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 1415-1436
Author(s):  
Dušan Kesić ◽  
Milenko Dželetović ◽  
Miloš Tomić

Crime reporting occupies a central position in the print and broadcast media agenda. The key thing about media reporting on crime is the question of the impact that the dominant media discourse on crime has on the public perception of this phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to make an insight at how crime is presented in the media, to identify the criteria that guide the selection of crime news, and finally, the impact that media presentation of crime has on the audience. Researches on media reporting on crime suggest that the over-representation of violent crime affects the media's construction of crime, by presenting this phenomenon as dominantly violent.


Human Arenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Nakkerud

AbstractOver the past decade, the choice of living childfree has increasingly been viewed as a pro-environmental behaviour. Recent research has investigated statistical relations between environmental concern and reproductive attitudes, as well as exploring the processes around actually deciding to live environmentally childfree. Based on increased public attention about the phenomenon, this article employs Michael Billig’s notion of ideological dilemmas to analyse the media coverage of choosing to live environmentally childfree, attempting to answer how these dilemmas influence whether living childfree is perceived as a relevant pro-environmental behaviour. Thirty-one news items were analysed using a synthesis of critical discursive psychology and thematic analysis. The analysis identified five ideological concepts: liberalism, sustainable development, globalism, biologism and humanism. Each of these concepts contains positions supporting and opposing the idea of living environmentally childfree in Norway. These ideological dilemmas seem to weaken the perceived relevance of living environmentally childfree, as the topic is easily dismissed or framed as irrelevant. I therefore conclude that the discourse of living environmentally childfree is analogous to how society generally relates to solutions to the environmental crises.


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