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A new environmental ban has forced the restructure of open dumps in China since 1 July 2011. A technical process was established in this study that is feasible for the upgrade of open dumps through restructuring. The feasibility of restructuring and the benefit of greenhouse gas emission reductions were assessed according to field surveys of five landfills and four dumps in Nanjing. The results showed that the daily processing capacities of the existing landfills have been unable to meet the growth of municipal solid waste (MSW), making restructuring of the landfills imperative. According to an assessment of the technical process, only four sites in Nanjing were suitable for upgrading. Restructuring the Jiaozishan landfill effectively reduced the leachate generation rate by 5.84% under its scale when expanded by 60.7% in 2015. CO2 emissions were reduced by approximately 55,000–86,000 tons per year, in which biogas power generation replaced fossil fuels Fossil fuels accounted for the largest proportion, up to 45,000–60,000 tons. Photovoltaic power generation on the overlying land has not only reduced CO2 emissions to 26,000–30,000 tons per year but has also brought in continuing income from the sale of electricity. The funds are essential for developing countries such as China, which lack long-term financial support for landfill management after closure.

Although the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) advocate, through SDG 4 and SDG 10, equitable quality education and the reduction of inequalities within and between countries, respectively, few studies have examined how inequalities in regional sustainability influence higher education. Therefore, this study aims to examine the relationship between regional sustainability and higher education in China using fixed-effects panel modelling. A systematic force framework showing how regional sustainability drives higher education was constructed from economic, social, and environmental perspectives, and the endogeneity in the process of how regional sustainability affects higher education was explored by introducing one-year lagged values as instrumental variables. Our results show that regional sustainability has a significant impact on higher educational attainment in China, with differing effects in the eastern, central, and western regions, respectively. In central China, economic sustainability plays a significant positive role in higher educational attainment; in the western region, economic and social sustainability have stronger positive effects, while environmental sustainability has significantly negative effects. In terms of policy implications, our findings can be used to support regional development policies to promote regional higher education.

In this work, the impact of exogenous aerobic bacteria mixture (EABM) on municipal solid waste (MSW) is well evaluated in the following aspects: biogas production, leachate analysis, organic waste degradation, EABM population, and the composition of microbial communities. The study was designed and performed as follows: the control bioreactor (R1) was filled up with MSW and the culture medium of EABM and the experimental bioreactor (R2) was filled up with MSW and EABM. The data suggests that the composition of microbial communities (bacterial and methanogenic) in R1 and R2 were similar at day 0, while the addition of EABM in R2 led to a differential abundance of Bacillus cereus, Bacillus subtilis, Staphylococcus saprophyticus, Staphlyoccus xylosus, and Pantoea agglomerans in two bioreactors. The population of exogenous aerobic bacteria in R2 greatly increased during hydrolysis and acidogenesis stages, and subsequently increased the degradation of volatile solid (VS), protein, lipid, and lignin by 59.25%, 25.68%, 60.47%, and 197.62%, respectively, compared to R1. The duration of hydrolysis and acidogenesis in R2 was 33.33% shorter than that in R1. At the end of the study, the accumulative methane yield in R2 (494.4 L) was almost three times more than that in R1 (187.4 L). In addition, the abundance of acetoclasic methanogens increased at acetogenesis and methanogenesis stages in both bioreactors, which indicates that acetoclasic methanogens (especially Methanoseata) could contribute to methane production. This study demonstrates that EABM can accelerate organic waste degradation to promote MSW biodegradation and methane production. Moreover, the operational parameters helped EABM to generate 20.85% more in accumulative methane yield. With a better understanding of how EABM affects MSW and the composition of bacterial community, this study offers a potential practical approach to MSW disposal and cleaner energy generation worldwide.

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) can lead to environmental pollution and threaten human health due to their toxic and carcinogenic nature. The emission of VOCs increases dramatically with the accelerated industrialization and economic growth. Adsorption is identified as one of the most promising recovery technologies owing to its cost-effectiveness, flexible operation, and low energy consumption. In particular, adsorption-based technologies have a high potential to recycle both adsorbents and adsorbates, typically to capture valuable aromatic VOCs from industrial exhaust. Porous materials such as carbon-based materials, zeolite-based materials, and organic polymers and their composites have been extensively developed for VOCs adsorption focusing in adsorption capacity, hydrophobic property, thermal stability and regenerability. Among them, porous carbons as VOCs adsorbents have attracted increasingly attention, because they can be regulated by tuning the pore structure for VOCs accessibility during the adsorption process. Moreover, porous carbons can adsorb target VOCs by controlling the pore structure and surface functional groups. Significantly, the pore size distribution of porous carbons mostly controls the VOCs sorption process. Micropores provide the main adsorption sites, while mesopores enhance the diffusion of VOCs. In this review, the adsorption mechanism of VOCs onto porous carbons was generally concluded. Porous carbons can be designed as a specific structure for adsorption of aromatic VOCs by controlling the pore structure, hydrophobic sites, π-electronic structure, and surface functional groups. Since there are limited review literatures on porous carbons derived from renewable resources for VOCs adsorption, this paper will provide an overview on the synthesis of porous carbons from biomass and other organic wastes for VOCs adsorption or integrated oxidation processes (e.g., photocatalysis, non-thermal plasma catalysis, chemical catalysis) under ambient conditions with the objective of guiding ...

The issue of achieving sustainable livelihoods (SL) is a persistent problem that has gained significant interest for all countries. Even though contexts of vulnerability have been highlighted to be critical to SL, the difference of SL under vulnerability contexts, particularly disaster, has been ignored. As one disaster-prone area, there is an urgent need to conduct studies on SL in Shenzha, within the context of the construction of a national park. This paper proposes to address this research gap by evaluating SL under various disaster contexts in Shenzha, China. According to the frequency of natural disasters, towns in Shenzha can be divided into three groups: Snowstorm and windstorm-dominated towns (SWT), mixed towns (MT) and drought-dominated towns (DT). The results showed that (1) a great disparity of SL can be observed among the three vulnerability groups. The scores of these SL were sorted into descending order as: DT > SWT > MT. (2) In detail, herdsmen in DT have a high value of SL because they have high livelihood assets, livelihood strategies and disaster management capabilities. (3) Herdsmen in SWT have high livelihood assets, particularly human and financial assets, and livelihood strategies. (4) The low livelihood assets and livelihood strategies have restricted the SL of herdsmen in MT. An analysis of SL under various disaster contexts helped to depict the characteristics of SL. Accordingly, targeted policies were developed for the development of SL under various disaster contexts.

The rapid increase in urbanization has brought about a great deal of ecological problems, and thus the systematic protection of the environment is vital. Ecological security patterns are important for maintaining regional ecological stability and sustainable urban development. Human disturbance is a key factor affecting the stability and sustainable development of ecosystems. This paper constructs an ecological security pattern and evaluates the degree of human disturbance in Fuzhou City. Through a comprehensive analysis of both of these factors, the ecological priority restoration areas in Fuzhou were identified. The study shows that (1) there are 40 ecological source areas in Fuzhou, with a total area of 4556.48 km2; 83 ecological corridors, with a total distance of 179.33 km; and 30 ecological nodes. (2) The human disturbance degree score in the study area is between 0 and 0.8. The degree of human disturbance forms two larger major cores in Cangshan District, Gulou District, and Fuqing City. (3) The scores for the degree of human disturbance with ecological sources range from 0 to 0.42. The high-priority areas in the study area are distributed at the edges of ecological sources and form two high-scoring aggregation areas in Fuqing City and Jinan District. These corridors have a high degree of human disturbance with scores between 0 and 0.56. The I and II priority areas are mostly found in longer corridors in Fuqing City and Cangshan District near coastal or urban centers, and the III priority areas are mainly distributed in ecological corridors near the inland. The human disturbance degree scores of the nodes range from 0.01 to 0.27, and the nodes with higher grades were mainly distributed in the northeast, southeast, northwest and southwest of the study area.

The generally adopted worldwide target is to keep the increase in the global mean temperature lower than 2 °C by 2100, which is comparable with that of the preindustrial era. It is feasible for China to realize an emission pathway that is consistent with this target, however, we need to understand the roadmap to do so. In this paper, the results of a modeling study by the Integrated Policy Assessment Model for China (IPAC) concerning the investment required to realize the 2 °C scenario by examining the penetration of low-carbon technologies including energy supply and energy efficiency improvement in end-use sectors is presented. It is found that the investment required in the energy supply sector to realize the 2 °C scenario could reach CN¥1.2 trillion by 2020, CN¥1.0 trillion by 2030, and CN¥1.4 trillion by 2050. The investment needed for energy saving could reach CN¥1.6 trillion by 2020, CN¥1.8 trillion by 2030, and CN¥1.5 trillion by 2050, which represents the additional investment as compared with the use of old technologies. If the investment required both in the energy supply sector and in energy saving in end-use sectors is considered, the total investment is estimated to be CN¥2.8 trillion by 2020, CN¥2.8 trillion by 2030, and CN¥2.9 trillion by 2050. These investments account for 2.5% of Chinas total GDP in 2020, 1.3% in 2030, and 0.6% by 2050, which represents quite a small investment percentage to realize the goal of low-carbon development.

As the volume and scale of urban expressways continue to increase, renewal remains a concern for urban development. The renewal and decision-making of an urban expressway need to be endowed with new concepts to adapt to the rapid development of cities. Nevertheless, in addition to considering road factors such as facility conditions, driving conditions, and environmental protection, the existing evaluation system lacks comprehensive consideration of factors that improve resilience and adapt to future urban development, and it lacks a quantifiable general update evaluation system. Thus, the establishment of a comprehensive renewal indicator system and a mixed evaluation framework is a challenge. This study proposes an evaluation framework of expressway renewal indicators that integrates the three dimensions of macro, meso, and micro based on the fuzzy Delphi method, the fuzzy AHP method, and the TOPSIS method. A q-rung orthopair fuzzy linguistic set was used to handle expert uncertainty information in the process of conducting fuzzy evaluations. The indicators were refined into general and quantifiable evaluation indicators to improve their versatility. Moreover, the renewal value of expressways was measured and calculated using the TOPSIS method, and four renewal intervals were divided according to the calculation results. As a result, 28 renewal indicators were screened out, and the five factors with the greatest impact on renewal were the demand for transport development, the renewal of facility and service functions, the upgrading of institutional resilience, structural renewal, and economic development. The model was applied to eight expressways in Shanghai to calculate the renewal degree value and divide the renewal status. The model could identify the renewal needs of each road to guide the renewal decision. This study proposes an evaluation model to measure urban expressway renewal studies and provides a reference for urban renewal in the area of sustainable development