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This study highlights how Chinese economic development detrimentally impacted water quality in recent decades and how this has been improved by enormous investment in environmental remediation funded by the Chinese government. To our knowledge, this study is the first to describe the variability of surface water quality in inland waters in China, the affecting drivers behind the changes, and how the government-financed conservation actions have impacted water quality. Water quality was found to be poorest in the North and the Northeast China Plain where there is greater coverage of developed land (cities + cropland), a higher gross domestic product (GDP), and higher population density. There are significant positive relationships between the concentration of the annual mean chemical oxygen demand (COD) and the percentage of developed land use (cities + cropland), GDP, and population density in the individual watersheds (p < 0.001). During the past decade, following Chinese government-financed investments in environmental restoration and reforestation, the water quality of Chinese inland waters has improved markedly, which is particularly evident from the significant and exponentially decreasing GDP-normalized COD and ammonium (NH4+-N) concentrations. It is evident that the increasing GDP in China over the past decade did not occur at the continued expense of its inland water ecosystems. This offers hope for the future, also for other industrializing countries, that with appropriate environmental investments a high GDP can be reached and maintained, while simultaneously preserving inland aquatic ecosystems, particularly through management of sewage discharge.

Sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 are geared toward sustainable development through various pathways, one being reducing inequality as covered in SDG 10. Inequalities are a threat to health and wellbeing of populations and a planet Earth in which we live. This rapid review aims to identify key issues that are likely to exacerbate inequalities around the six SDGs directly related to One Health, which are SDG 3, 6, 11, 13, 14 and 15, and suggest some actions that may help to address them using inclusive governance taking into account the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Informed by the literature on SDGs and using the “inclusive development concept” by Gupta and Vegelin, literature search was done in Google Scholar, PubMed Central, as well as, searching of references in the relevant articles identified using search terms from the six SDGs that are directly related to One Health. In the context of the SDGs, in order to achieve One Health through inclusive governance, and tackle inequalities, the following needs to be considered and addressed: increasing number of armed conflicts; ongoing COVID-19 pandemic; ensuring availability of water and sanitation facilities; improving city and urban areas planning to cope with climate change; improving governance arrangements for addressing climate change factoring gender and human rights; multisectoral planning for conservation of oceans, seas, and marine resources; balancing trade regulation of wildlife trade with conservation efforts; need for a research collaborative involving experts from environmental sciences, wildlife, agriculture and human health to study and develop scientific evidence on contribution of changes in land use practices to occurrence of zoonotic diseases; and need of a legislation for promoting animal welfare to protect public health. Also, inclusion of people with disabilities in the use of digital technologies is critical.

AbstractAlloy anodes composed of microsized particles receive increasing attention recently, which outperform the nanostructured counterparts in both the manufacturing cost and volumetric energy density. However, the pulverization of particles and fracture of solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) during cycling brings about fast capacity degradation. Herein, it is shown how normally considered fragile SEI can become highly elastic through electrolyte chemistry regulation. Compared to the SEI constructed in classic carbonate electrolyte, the atomic force microscopy tests reveal that the one built in ether‐based electrolyte doubles the maximum elastic strain to accommodate the repeated swelling‐contracting. Such an SEI effectively encapsulates the microsized Sb anodes to prevent the capacity loss from particle isolation. Coupled with an intercalation‐assisted alloying reaction mechanism, a sustained capacity of ≈573 mAh g−1 after 180 cycles at 0.1 A g−1 with outstanding initial Coulombic efficiency is obtained, which is among the highest values achieved in K‐ion batteries. This study emphasizes the significance of building robust SEI, which offers the opportunity to enable stable microsized alloy anodes.

Abstract The housing growth programme could offer an opportunity for accelerating the deployment of decentralised renewable energy systems (DRES) in the UK. The Government hopes to leverage private sector investment into DRES as part of new housing projects. The aim of this paper is to assess whether current regulatory and funding frameworks are sufficient to achieve this. The question is explored by drawing on the experience of developers, local authorities, energy utilities and service companies operating in the largest housing growth region in the UK–Thames Gateway. Their experience suggests that the current low intervention approach will be insufficient to generate the shift required in both industries. In order to be more successful economic and regulatory instruments should focus on producers (house-builders and energy providers) rather than consumers (households). Tighter regulation is needed to ensure that producers have a responsibility to install DRES as part of new developments, to enable connection to the grid, to ensure a sustained financial return from investment and revenue is spent on the expansion of new renewable energy infrastructure. This regulatory framework must be under-pinned by substantial funds focused on producers. Greater intervention is needed if DRES is to be included in new housing development.

Funding Information: This work was supported Southeast University (SEU) project 3203002003A1 and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under the grant 51772080 and 11604088 . Jiangsu Provincial Innovation and Entrepreneurship Talent program Project No. JSSCRC2021491 . Industry-University-Research Cooperation Project of Jiangsu Province in China , Grant No. BY2021057 . Dr. Asghar thanks the Hubei Talent 100 program and Academy of Finland ( 13329016 , 13322738 ) for their financial support. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Authors Electrolytes with high-proton conduction and low activation energy are attractive for reducing the high operating temperature of solid-oxide fuel cells to less than <600 °C. In this work, we have fabricated semiconducting electrolyte SrFeTiO3-δ (SFT) material exhibiting high ionic conduction and exceptionally high protonic conduction at low operating temperature but with low electronic conduction to evade the short-circuiting issue. The prepared fuel cell device exhibited high open-circuit voltage (OCV) and a high-power output of 534 mW/cm2, of which 474 mW/cm2 could be for sure be related to the protonic part. The current study suggests that usage of semiconductor SrFeTiO3-δ facilitates a high concentration of oxygen vacancies on the surface of SFT, which mainly benefits proton conduction. Moreover, lower grain boundary resistance leads to obtain higher performance. Also, the Schottky junction phenomena are proposed to inhibit the e-conduction and excel the ions transportation. The high performance and ionic conductivity suggest that SFT could be a promising electrolyte for protonic ceramic fuel cells. Peer reviewed

In recent years, prices for photovoltaics have fallen steadily and the demand for sustainable energy has increased. Consequentially, the assessment of roof surfaces in terms of their suitability for PV (Photovoltaic) installations has continuously gained in importance. Several types of assessment approaches have been established, ranging from sampling to complete census or aerial image analysis methodologies. Assessments of rooftop photovoltaic potential are multi-stage processes. The sub-task of examining the photovoltaic potential of individual rooftops is crucial for exact case study results. However, this step is often time-consuming and requires lots of computational effort especially when some form of intelligent classification algorithm needs to be trained. This often leads to the use of sampled rooftop utilization factors when investigating large-scale areas of interest, as data-driven approaches usually are not well-scalable. In this paper, a novel neighbourhood-based filtering approach is introduced that can analyse large amounts of irradiation data in a vectorised manner. It is tested in an application to the city of Giessen, Germany, and its surrounding area. The results show that it outperforms state-of-the-art image filtering techniques. The algorithm is able to process high-resolution data covering 1 km2 within roughly 2.5 s. It successfully classifies rooftop segments which are feasible for PV installations while omitting small, obstructed or insufficiently exposed segments. Apart from minor shortcomings, the approach presented in this work is capable of generating per-rooftop PV potential assessments at low computational cost and is well scalable to large scale areas.

In this paper, metabolic evaluation has been employed for better understanding the trends in urban environmental changes. Due to the urban activities cause impacts not only on local level but also a broader scale, Hybrid Emergy-LCA (HEML), a combining approach of Emergy Analysis (EMA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is structured to quantitatively investigate the mechanism. For the similarity across many emerging cities in China, a large-scale sub-urban residential area named Tian Tongyuan (Try) in Beijing was chosen for testing the HEML. Objective indicators of live quality and negative impacts are both considered. Analysis indicates that the household Emergy input of TTY is 1.76E+16 sej/yr, while the prominent environmental impact is induced by Photochemical Oxidant Creation Potentials (POCP), 4.58E+05 g ethane eq./yr. The sustainable performance constructed by its live quality and environmental impacts of TTY is found as 98.80% as that of Beijing average. Mitigation polices on the building sector should be proposed because of its dominating impacts among various consuming ends of energy and materials. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract Hydrogen is considered a potential game changer for world energy systems and a solution to climate change concerns, as it generates zero waste and it is suited for power generation and transportation. Despite its several advantages, there are significant technical challenges in deploying a stable hydrogen economy including improving its process efficiencies, lowering production costs, maintaining cost-effective transmission and distribution, and exploiting inexpensive and sustainable feedstocks. In this context, a detailed study was conducted to analyze the production sources, technologies, storage and transport systems, and global potential exportable feedstocks to produce hydrogen. A comprehensive analysis of current hydrogen production technologies with their energy efficiencies and hydrogen selling prices was reported in this study. Various hydrogen production technologies with their capital investments and CO2 emissions were also presented. Potential feedstocks for hydrogen production were identified and analyzed through a product space model, which characterizes a network of global exportable products based on their similarities and productive knowledge. It was established that the hydrogen production feedstocks and sources currently used are primarily available in six countries: the United States of America, France, Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Spain. Broadly, the results revealed that the United States of America and Russia shared the highest hydrogen feedstock exports, indicating a higher probability of hydrogen production in these countries. Except for Russia, all the studied countries fell in the most desired quadrant, indicating that they can move in all product space directions to exploit unexplored hydrogen feedstocks for better sustainable economic growth.