Intergovernmental Collaborations and Governance for the Development of Metropolitan Economic Zones in the Changjiang (Yangtze River) Delta, China

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-339
Author(s):  
Jae Wook Park
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (21) ◽  
pp. 5923
Author(s):  
He ◽  
Wang ◽  
Ji ◽  
Wei ◽  
Wang ◽  
...  

With the change in China’s social structure and the emergence of the middle class, severe environmental pollution is stimulating the demand for social environmental justice in China. Facing the absence of environmental justice theory and related empirical research in China, this article introduces a general equilibrium theory model of environmental justice. It proves that under Pareto efficiency, environmental justice is difficult to achieve in a competitive market, and environmental inequality is the normal state. An econometric model is established based on demographic and socioeconomic factors, comparison with the US principle of environmental justice, and characteristic perspectives in the Chinese context. The study takes 444 counties in China’s four major economic zones, the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei, and Chengdu–Chongqing, as the units for empirical analysis of the regional distribution of environmental inequality. The results indicate that rural residents bear higher environmental risks than urban residents. There are different environmentally vulnerable groups and environmental disparities among the four economic zones; notably, minorities in the Pearl River Delta, poor residents in Chengdu–Chongqing, and rural residents in the Yangtze River Delta bear the environmental inequality caused by industrial gas pollution. However, migrants, including rural migrants, do not disproportionately suffer environmental risks caused by industrial pollution at the county level. This paper provides theoretical support and a systematic analytical framework for the study of China’s environmental justice issues. We describe China’s environmental inequality status and provide a reference for the design of environmental justice interventions.


Author(s):  
Shufeng She ◽  
Bifeng Hu ◽  
Xianglin Zhang ◽  
Shuai Shao ◽  
Yefeng Jiang ◽  
...  

Potentially toxic elements (PTEs) pollution in the agricultural soil of China, especially in developed regions such as the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) in eastern China, has received increasing attention. However, there are few studies on the long-term assessment of soil pollution by PTEs over large regions. Therefore, in this study, a meta-analysis was conducted to evaluate the current state and temporal trend of PTEs pollution in the agricultural land of the Yangtze River Delta. Based on a review of 118 studies published between 1993 and 2020, the average concentrations of Cd, Hg, As, Pb, Cr, Cu, Zn, and Ni were found to be 0.25 mg kg−1, 0.14 mg kg−1, 8.14 mg kg−1, 32.32 mg kg−1, 68.84 mg kg−1, 32.58 mg kg−1, 92.35 mg kg−1, and 29.30 mg kg−1, respectively. Among these elements, only Cd and Hg showed significant accumulation compared with their background values. The eastern Yangtze River Delta showed a relatively high ecological risk due to intensive industrial activities. The contents of Cd, Pb, and Zn in soil showed an increasing trend from 1993 to 2000 and then showed a decreasing trend. The results obtained from this study will provide guidance for the prevention and control of soil pollution in the Yangtze River Delta.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 804
Author(s):  
Bo Niu ◽  
Dazhuan Ge ◽  
Rui Yan ◽  
Yingyi Ma ◽  
Dongqi Sun ◽  
...  

In recent years, the impact of land-use systems on global climate change has become increasingly significant, and land-use change has become a hot issue of concern to academics, both within China and abroad. Urbanization, as an important socioeconomic factor, plays a vital role in promoting land-use transition, which also shows a significant spatial dependence on urbanization. This paper constructs a theoretical framework for the interaction relationship between urbanization and land-use transition, taking the Yangtze River Delta as an example, and measures the level of urbanization from the perspective of population urbanization, economic urbanization and social urbanization, while also evaluating the level of land-use morphologies from the perspective of dominant and recessive morphologies of land-use. We construct a PVAR model and coupled coordination model based on the calculated indexes for empirical analysis. The results show that the relationship between urbanization and land-use transition is not a simple linear relationship, but tends to be complex with the process of urbanization, and reasonable urbanization and land-use morphologies will promote further benign coupling in the system. By analyzing the interaction relationship between urbanization and land-use transition, this study enriches the study of land-use change and provides new pathways for thinking about how to promote high-quality urbanization.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 495
Author(s):  
Daizhong Tang ◽  
Mengyuan Mao ◽  
Jiangang Shi ◽  
Wenwen Hua

This paper conducts an analytical study on the urban-rural coordinated development (URCD) in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration (YRDUA), and uses data from 2000–2015 of 27 central cities to study the spatial and temporal evolution patterns of URCD and to discover the influencing factors and driving forces behind it through PCA, ESDA and spatial regression models. It reveals that URCD of the YRDUA shows an obvious club convergence phenomenon during the research duration. The regions with high-level URCD gather mainly in the central part of the urban agglomeration, while the remaining regions mostly have low-level URCD, reflecting the regional aggregation phenomenon of spatial divergence. At the same time, we split URCD into efficiency and equity: urban-rural efficient development (URED) also exhibits similar spatiotemporal evolution patterns, but the patterns of urban-rural balanced development (URBD) show some variability. Finally, by analyzing the driving forces in major years during 2000–2015, it can be concluded that: (i) In recent years, influencing factors such as government financial input and consumption no longer play the main driving role. (ii) Influencing factors such as industrialization degree, fixed asset investment and foreign investment even limit URCD in some years. The above results also show that the government should redesign at the system level to give full play to the contributing factors depending on the actual state of development in different regions and promote the coordinated development of urban and rural areas. The results of this study show that the idea of measuring URCD from two dimensions of efficiency and equity is practical and feasible, and the spatial econometric model can reveal the spatial distribution heterogeneity and time evolution characteristics of regional development, which can provide useful insights for urban-rural integration development of other countries and regions.


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