Xuepeng Qian

As the urgency of addressing climate change grows, strategies such as developing zero-emission campuses to achieve carbon neutrality are becoming increasingly crucial. Yet, research in this field remains somewhat underdeveloped and fragmented. This study aims to bridge this gap, providing a scientometric analysis of the research conducted on zero-emission campuses from 1997 to 2023, using data from the Web of Science Core Collection. The study analyzed 1009 bibliographic records with the aid of CiteSpace software, focusing on identifying key co-authors, co-words, co-citations, and clusters. The findings indicate a rapid increase in research in the field of zero-emission campuses, with a significant surge in the number of publications in recent years, culminating in 174 in 2021 alone. The leading universities in terms of publication count were the University of California System, Egyptian Knowledge Bank, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Furthermore, the United States, China, and the United Kingdom were identified as the main contributing countries/regions to publishing in this field, indicating a broad, global collaboration. The scope of research has broadened from technical elements, such as energy, to encompass social factors that influence sustainability. Emerging research areas were identified, including education and sustainability, renewable energy and energy efficiency, campus planning and design, waste management and recycling, policy support, and pro-environmental behavior. This study provides a structured overview of the research landscape in the field of zero-emission campuses, offering valuable guidance for academics and encouraging further collaboration. The identified research clusters, notable authors, and influential institutions hold significant implications for policy decisions, industry practices, and the implementation of zero-emission strategies on campuses, aiding in the broader pursuit of sustainability.

Breaking the highly oil-dependent energy use structure in the transportation sector will be crucial for China to reduce its dependence on crude oil imports and ensure its energy security, and the development of new energy vehicles is helping to break this dilemma. A time series analysis summarizes the possible relationships between new energy vehicles and crude oil imports, i.e., new energy vehicles, as alternatives to fuel vehicles, will reduce the demand for oil in the transportation sector, which will in turn reduce crude oil imports, and crude oil prices and crude oil production will inhibit crude oil imports. In this empirical study, monthly data from 2015 to 2021 on crude oil imports, the market share of new energy vehicles, crude oil prices, and crude oil production are selected, time-series multiple regression modelling is adopted, and endogeneity is treated using a generalized method of moments (GMM). The regression results show that crude oil imports decrease by one unit for every 16.32% increase in crude oil prices, indicating that price factor is the most influential factor in China’s crude oil imports, while crude oil imports decrease by one unit for every 133.99% increase in crude oil production, indicating that an increase in crude oil production contributes less to the reduction of crude oil imports. One unit of crude oil imports is added for every 15.53% increase in the share of new energy vehicles, indicating that the effect of new energy vehicles on limiting crude oil imports has not yet emerged. Probably due to the fact that new energy vehicles have not yet had a significant impact on fuel vehicles, oil consumption will continue to increase in the short and medium term, with oil for the petrochemical industry becoming the primary driver of this increase. Finally, policy implications are provided from the perspective of crude oil demand, supply, and China’s oil price mechanism.

Research on the impact of corporate board diversity on corporate governance for corporate sustainability development is on the rise. However, studies on the effects of gender diversity on corporate environmental performance are limited to traditional corporate social responsibility reports, disclosures, and ratings. This study, instead, explores such effects, focusing on overall carbon emissions. It employs a novel dataset compiled based on direct overall carbon emissions at the firm level in Japan. Accordingly, firms with female outside directors are more likely to have lower carbon emissions. By contrast, abatement effects are muted if women are appointed as inside directors. The findings are robust to several identification strategies employed to address potential endogeneity issues. The policy implications encourage corporations to strengthen sustainability performance from the governance perspective.

The occurrence and intensity of climatic and hydrologic extreme events, as indicators of climate change, are increasing in most parts of arid and semi-arid regions, including Ardabil province, Iran. Recent studies have revealed the need for the multidimensional assessment of flood disasters in this area. Consequently, this present study was conducted to provide comprehensive information on the flood vulnerability of 26 watersheds in Ardabil province. Here, six components, including meteorological, hydrological, physical-environmental, social, economic, and countermeasures, were computed at a watershed scale based on 19 different criteria. Finally, the flood vulnerability index (FVI) for each watershed was calculated. The results revealed the need for different management approaches for flood hotspots based on the vulnerability to the six components studied. The integrated FVI showed that 46.97%, 33.63%, 18.10%, 1.20%, and 0.10% of the province have very high, high, medium, low, and very low flood vulnerability, respectively. The spatial mapping also revealed that all study areas were under flood stress, except small parts in central, east, and north. The preliminary version of the flood vulnerability atlas is presented, which estimates the flood disaster risk throughout the province. In addition, the developed regional framework in this study also allows for more comprehensive and extensive dataset analysis.

Lin, X., Zhou, W., Qian, X., Nakagami, K.

A secured supply of clean water and sanitation relies on material- and capital-intensive municipal infrastructures, and thus requires a large quantity of material stocks. Major infrastructures sustaining the municipal water cycle from water supply to sewage management in China were probed for the period 1980–2050. The infrastructures proliferated rapidly in Chinese cities during the past three decades. The annual water supply capacity climbed from 11 to 100 km3, the sewage treatment capacity soared from 1.1 to 50 km3. To meet the demand of increasing urbanization, these infrastructures may have to more than doubly expand by 2050. Up to 3.3 gigatonnes (Gt) of construction materials, including 170 megatonnes (Mt) iron and steel and nearly 400 Mt cement (approximate to 10% of the global steel and cement production per annum), may be used to build up the infrastructure stocks. An indicator of material stock efficiency was devised to estimate potential and practical services per material stocks in the infrastructures can provide. Key findings include: (i) The conventional network-based water and sewage infrastructures might perform a declining material stock efficiency over the long run. (ii) The stock-based efficiency of the municipal infrastructures decreased by 25% from its peak in the early 1990s. It is driven down by the fact that pipe networks and sewage facilities are more material-intensive and usually developed behind water works. (iii) Nearly a half of the water supply capacity and 20% of the sewage treatment capacity were underutilized, leading to an evident gap between the potential and practical efficiency. The gap can be minimized by improving the utilization of the infrastructure's installed capacity.

A better understanding of the economy-material-emissions nexus is fundamental in order to reveal the interactions between human development and the natural environment, and more importantly, to design integrated de-carbonization and de-materialization policies. In this paper, we conducted a decoupling analysis of fossil fuel-induced CO2 emissions and in-use material stocks in infrastructure to economic growth at the provincial level in China and investigated the trilateral causal relationships among the three indicators. The results show that the average elasticity of CO2 emissions and material stocks to economic growth was smaller than 1, representing a status of relative decoupling. However, in many less developed provinces in central and western China, we observed increasing trends of elasticity in the past three decades, which suggest their economic growth became more tightly linked to CO2 emissions and the accumulation of material stocks. Granger tests suggest that in the long run there existed a unidirectional causality running from CO2 emissions, economic growth and urbanization to material stocks. In the short run, a bi-directional causality between CO2 emissions and economic growth and a unidirectional causality from material stocks to CO2 emissions were detected. Policy implications for the de-carbonization and de-materialization transition include enhancing renewable energy utilization, upgrading industries to less carbon-intensive ones, developing compact cities, prolonging the lifespan of infrastructure, and strengthening the life-cycle carbon management of infrastructure.

Global warming, mainly due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, has a devastating effect on our living planet. To combat it and foster a low-carbon society, contributions from the sports community are needed. Accordingly, the concept of ‘green sports’ has emerged, calling for green performance of sports infrastructure, green production in sports manufacturing, and green awareness of sports community. In this respect, Japan, as a leader in both Asian sports and worldwide sustainable development, has valuable experiences, including widespread stakeholders’ participation, substantial efforts, and outstanding achievements. Inspired by Japan’s examples, this study not only summarises mainstream recommendations for the development of green sports, but also presents two innovative proposals – linking green sports with market-based flexibility mechanisms and promoting environmental education through sports celebrities – and the prospects for these approaches. This article could be used by worldwide sports community as reference for making contributions to the establishment of a low-carbon society.

In order to minimize the total time cost of all the trips, a new transit network optimization model is developed in consideration of reducing not only time-consuming transfers but also trips which have to make relatively more transfers by optimizing the layout of the transit routes. In contrast to commonly taking the time cost of a transfer in a trip roughly as a constant in a public transit network design work, this research attaches much importance to the effect of the transfer time composition on the total time expense of a transit trip. A genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the newly developed optimization model. The bus route network in an urban region of a city in China is studied for example in this research. It is confirmed that the new optimization model solved by the proposed genetic algorithm is able to more rationally provide the optimal solution to the design of a relatively large-scaled transit network for its efficient operation. In future research, more experiments are necessary to further validate and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of applying the new model solved by the proposed genetic algorithm.

Water produced from municipal utilities accounts for nearly 10% of the sum water demand in China. The municipal water cycle that integrates processes of urban water supply, water use, sewage treatment, and water reclamation has been assessed for 655 cities across nine drainage areas in mainland China in 2012. These cities in total extracted 55 km(3) raw water for municipal use from surface waterbodies and ground aquifers, approximate to the country-wide freshwater extraction of Russia or Italy. After purification and transmission, 45 km(3) water was distributed to industrial, service, and domestic users. 36 km(3) of post-use sewage was collected and environmentally safely treated; merely 3.2 km(3) of the treated water was reclaimed. Driven by increasing urbanization, the municipal water demand in cities of China may grow 70% by 2030. The Hai River and the Huai River basins, which harbor 137 cities and occupy a majority of the densely populated North China Plain, are most exposed to physical water scarcity. The municipal water abstraction in these cities can remain constant by promoting demand-side and process conservation in the next two decades. Interbasin transfer and unconventional sources will provide municipal water double than the cities' need. Whereas the urban water security can be technically enhanced, the challenges are to better improve water use efficiency and mitigate economic and environmental costs of the municipal system. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Cities are both the main source of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and the main arena of emission reductions. However, many cities have difficulties to compile the GHG inventories to support their mitigation plans and actions scientifically. Currently, the IPCC framework of inventories is mostly sector-based, within which the emission from a certain sector is estimated as an aggregated volume based on statistical yearbooks. Since the data is only available above some administration level, emissions are difficult to scale down to a specific geographical boundary. With this circumstance, a spatial explicit accounting approach on the city-level GHG inventory is required to provide sophisticated information for the better decision-making on the local mitigation actions. The aim of this study is to propose a location-based GHG inventory approach to fill the gap. The proposed inventory framework uses sampling surveys, enterprise GHG reports and the geo-referenced data to estimate the emissions and the spatial distributions. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are used to integrate the results. The proposed framework is applied to Oita Prefecture, Japan as an implication to test the approach's feasibility and offering enlightening insights. Since the emission sources are visible on maps and one can zoom to any necessary level of scale, the location-based inventory can better provide the spatial explicit information for better mitigation policy-making and environmental education at community levels. It will also provide enlightening insights to the in-depth investigation on the relationships between distribution of GHG emissions and the city landscapes, hence benefitting the low-carbon city research and practice in the future. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

An innovative ecosystem services-based sustainability assessment was conducted in the important urban agglomeration of the Lake Biwa region, Japan, covering the time period from 1950 to 2014. A 22-indicator system was established that was based on the major ecosystem services of Lake Biwa and its water courses, i.e., provisioning services regarding aquatic products and water; regulating services regarding floods and water quality; cultural services regarding recreation and tourism, scientific research, and environmental education; and supporting services regarding biodiversity. First, changes in the eight ecosystem services were discussed together with the considerable experience and difficult lessons that can be drawn from the development trajectory. Next, with the indicators rearranged according to sustainability principles, the regional sustainability over the past six plus decades was assessed. In general, this urban agglomeration has been progressing in terms of its sustainability, although economic and social development was achieved at the cost of environmental degradation in the past, and the current economic downturn is hurting the balanced development and integrated benefits. The results lead directly to recommendations for regional development, especially in terms of economic rejuvenation, from the perspective of improving management of Lake Biwa's water resources. Moreover, the relevant knowledge is educational and inspirational for other places in the world that are facing similar development issues. For example, the effective and even pioneering countermeasures that have been taken against environmental degradation, as well as the participation and collaboration of multiple stakeholders, could be useful as a model. Moreover, the study invites increased understanding of ecosystem vulnerability to anthropogenic devastation and emphasizes the priority of precautionary measures over countermeasures in the context of holistic urban planning and sustainable urban development. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.