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Community sociologists have examined community attachment through an almost exclusive focus on people’s social relations. Recent research efforts have noted the neglect of the physical place in traditional community sociological studies. Doing this has brought the physical environment into their discussions of community attachment. Despite this progress, we remain limited in our understanding of the physical environment’s contribution to peoples’ attachment to their communities and whether its effect on community attachment is applicable in the context of urban settings. In an effort to expand our knowledge of this topic, this study explored the contributions of the urban physical environment on community attachment. By selecting the Discovery Green Park as a typical form of physical environment in Houston, Texas, this study sought to investigate how people’s levels of community attachment could be predicted by: (1) peoples’ interactions with an urban park; (2) people’s emotional connections with such a park; and (3) peoples’ social interactions with others within the park. After conducting a series of block model regression analyses, we found that community attachment was not completely defined by social factors, but also depended upon peoples’ emotional connections with the local physical environment and the social interactions happening in those settings.

In recent years, the continuous spread of the COVID-19 epidemic has impacted the supply chain of enterprises. Mitigating the supply chain’s vulnerability has great significance for the survival and development of enterprises. Optimizing the business environment and building a digital government will help improve the external environment for enterprise development. However, its impact on the vulnerability of the enterprise supply chain has yet to be studied. Taking the impact of COVID-19 as an example, this paper uses the survey data of nearly 40,000 enterprises of the National Federation of Industry and Commerce in 2020 and “10,000 private enterprises evaluating the business environment”, to conduct systematic empirical research and fill the research gap in this area. The study indicates that the business environment and digital government can significantly mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the supply chain. This conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests. Mechanism analysis demonstrates that the business environment and digital government can prompt the government to introduce effective mitigation measures promptly, better guarantee production factors and logistics, and thus improve the vulnerability of the enterprise supply chain. This study deepens our understanding of the economic outcome of the business environment and digital government and also sheds new light on supply chain management.

To improve the utilization rate of parking space resources and reduce the cost of installing and maintaining sensor recognition, this paper proposed an improved computer vision-based parking space status recognition method. The overall recognition accuracy was improved by graying the video, filtering smoothing noise reduction, image enhancement pre-processing, introducing texture feature extraction method based on LBP operator, improving the background difference method, and then, we used a perceptual hash algorithm to calculate the Hamming distance between the background image and the hash string of the current frame of the video, excluding the influence of light and pedestrian on recognition accuracy. Finally, a parking space status recognition system is developed relied on the Python environment, and parking spaces are recognized in three environmental states: with direct light, without direct light, and in rain and snow. The overall average accuracy of the experimental results was 97.2%, which verifies the accuracy of the model.

This study analyzes farmers’ perception of grazing restriction policies, grassland environment and ecological management following the implementation of environmental protection policies in northern China. Understanding farmers’ attitudes and their causes will hopefully aid in the creation and execution of future policies. One hundred and thirty-five households were surveyed at three occasions over the course of a decade to explore the causes and processes of farmers’ perception. Farmers’ ecological awareness tends to be short term. In areas with a degraded environment, farmers were eager to implement policies to improve the environment and recognized the positive impact of the grazing ban policy (GBP). However, as conditions improved, farmers’ recognition and acceptance of the GBP became negative. Although farmers recognized the benefits of the GBP, they showed little awareness of the long-term process of environmental governance. As can be seen from the farmers’ ecological awareness and their attitudes toward the GBP, they are more inclined to value short-term economic interest than ecological protection. We suggest that good environmental protection policy must take into account the ecological and economic interests of farmers.

The energy resource is an essential input of economic growth, which has an important impact on the ecological environment and social welfare. From the perspective of social welfare, considering the radial and non-radial characteristics of different input and output indicators, and the inseparability of the energy input and undesirable output, this study employs the non-separable hybrid DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) model to evaluate the total energy efficiency of Chinese provinces between 2012 and 2016. Furthermore, this study calculates the energy saving and emission reduction potentials of China. The results reveal that the average total factor energy efficiency in China from 2012 to 2016 is 0.694, which means that there are still 30.6% energy efficiency losses. There is great potential for China to save energy, reduce pollutant emissions, and increase the output of social welfare. There are great differences in the total factor energy efficiency among provinces. The average energy saving potential of the whole country is 60.5%. If the energy efficiency of all provinces can reach the frontier, the whole country can save more than half of the energy consumption. The highest national average emission reduction potential is SO2, followed by dust, CO2, and NOX. The implication of the conclusion is that in the development of regional economy, we cannot sacrifice the social welfare and sustainable development and take the growth rate of GDP as the only objective. Different energy saving and emission reduction policies should be put forward according to the characteristics of different provinces.

The theoretical model of the solidification process of a shell-and-tube ice storage (STIS) device with longitudinal fins is established. The liquid fraction, the energy-discharging rate and the ice storage ratio are investigated, with particular focus on the effects of the fin structure parameters on the solidification process. Furthermore, the temperature and the streamline distributions are discussed to reveal the mechanism of the solidification process in the STIS device and the negative effect of natural convection (NC). It is indicated that the solidification process of the STIS device is dominated by the heat transfer via the fins at the beginning, and then by the heat transfer at the water–ice interface. The ice storage is negatively affected by the NC, for the reason that the water with a higher temperature stays in the lower part of the STIS device and the temperature gradient at the water–ice interface is small. The ice storage performance can be enhanced by increasing the fin structure parameters, including height, thickness and number.

Willingness to pay (WTP) is a foundation of payment for environmental services (PES) and varies according to different stakeholders. Because of its high-quality environment, numerous inns have appeared around Erhai Lake, which has become the inn sector leader in China. Declining water quality of the lake contrasts sharply with the increasing number of inns, thus a policy that balances economic development and water protection is needed desperately. The Erhai Lake Resource Protection Fee (ELRPF) is a form of PES, constructed on the basis of the contingent value method (CVM) involving the relationship between perceived benefits, institutional trust, awareness, and supportive attitude. Using relevant data obtained from a survey questionnaire, SmartPls 3.0 software was used to analyze the factors influencing inn operators’ WTP. The results of the analysis of 307 questionnaires showed that institutional trust, PES cognition, and attitudes toward support significantly affected inn operators’ WTP, while perceived benefit did not. This result differs from results of research on other tourism stakeholders. The reasons for this difference might be the specific identity of operators, their cultural and place identity, ability and professional education, and complexities of the broker of ecosystem services.