构建人类命运共同体、应对气候变化与生态文明建设

全球气候变化给人类社会文明带来严峻挑战,需要人类社会采取共同措施和行动积极应对。应对全球气候变化是当今世界最能体现人类共同命运的领域,深度参与并积极推动全球气候治理体系改革和建设是中国推动构建人类命运共同体的重要实践,也是生态文明理论和实践的重要方面。应对气候变化是我国生态文明建设的重要内容和内在要求;以共同价值理念构建人类命运共同体,凝聚各国力量携手合作应对全球气候变化,是全球生态文明建设和构建人类命运共同体的具体实践,也为应对全球气候变化提供了良好载体和国际平台。文章通过分析可知,应对气候变化、生态文明建设与构建人类命运共同体三者之间,呈现出相互促进、和谐共生的"三位一体"特征;人与自然共生的生命共同体是前提条件,人类的任何实践活动都要以自然生态系统为基础和前提;人类命运共同体在整合各国力量方面,为生态文明建设提供了社会基础;生态文明包容各国文明,凝聚价值共识,成为生命共同体和人类命运共同体的价值导向。中国倡导人类命运共同体理念,是全球生态文明和人类命运共同体的积极倡导者、推动者和践行者,既为应对全球气候变化提供了价值基础,也提供了强有力的实践支撑;应对气候变化是全球生态文明建设和人类命运共同体构建的生动实践。因此,加强生态文明建设和构建人类命运共同体,为全球应对气候变化提供了理论基础和国际平台,也将为全球可持续发展贡献中国智慧和中国案例。     

Sustainable Development and Strategic Thinking

From an economic point of view, the industrial economy is efficient to overcome situations of a scarcity of goods. From a technological point of view, the resource efficiency of the manufacturing processes of the industrial economy has been permanently improved during the last 200 years. In addition, cleaner processes have been developed. However, from an ecologic point of view, an increasing world population with increasing consumption has produced a ＂global footprint＂ which approaches the carrying capacity of the planet. A circular economy and its high-value spin-offs-a lake economy and a performance or functional service economy-can fulfil customers＇ needs with considerably less resource consumption, less environmental impairment in production and considerably less end-of-life product waste, especially in situations of affluence, when a considerable stock of physical goods and infrastructures exists. Also, in situations of a scarcity of natural resources, both energy and materials, often characterised by rapidly rising resource prices, the economic actors of a circular economy have a high competitive advantage over the actors of the industrial economy, due to much lower procurement costs for materials and energy. From a social point of view, a circular economy increases the number of skilled jobs in regional enterprises. However, the shift from a linear manufacturing economy to a circular or service economy means a change in economic thinking from flow （throughput） management to stock （asset） management： in a manufacturing economy with largely unsaturated markets, total wealth increases through accumulation as resource throughput （flow） is transformed into a higher stock of goods of better quality （but in a manufacturing economy with largely saturated markets, wealth represented by the stock of goods will no longer increase）; in a circular or service economy, total wealth increases through a smart management of existing physical assets （stock） that are adapted to changes in both technology and customer demand. This second approach not only applies to physical capital but equally to social capital, such as health and education and green GDP. To measure the social wealth of a population, it is not the amount of money spent on schools and hospitals that matters, butif this expenditure has led to a better education of the students, and a better health of the people.     

流域管理体制研究

一个科学、合理的流域管理体制，是对流域的开发、利用和保护活动进行有效管理的先决条件，是实施流域可持续发展战略目标的基本组织保证。对我国现行的流域管理体制及其存在的问题作了较为深入的分析和研究，在此基础上提出了建立统一管理、垂直领导的流域管理新体制的主张，并对流域管理新体制的形成和运行提出了具体的建议。文章旨在为我国建立一个科学的流域管理体制提供一些研究意见。     

Stand-alone wind power system with battery/supercapacitor hybrid energy storage

This paper presents a stand-alone wind power system with battery/supercapacitor hybrid energy storage. A stand-alone wind power system mainly consists of a wind turbine, a permanent magnet synchronous generator, hybrid energy storage devices based on a vanadium redox flow battery and a supercapacitor, an AC/DC converter, two bidirectional DC/DC converters, a DC/AC converter and a variable load. Several control strategies for the stand-alone wind power system are involved such as a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) control, a vanadium redox flow battery charge/discharge control and a supercapacitor charge/discharge control. The proposed MPPT control combines a sliding mode control with an extreme search control to capture maximum wind energy. This strategy avoids the necessity of measuring wind velocity, obtaining models or parameters of the wind turbine and calculating the differentials of the power generated from the wind power system and from the speed of the generator. The battery charge/discharge control maintains a constant DC bus voltage. When the battery charging/discharging current reaches the setting threshold, the charge/discharge control of the supercapacitor is triggered to limit the charging/discharging current of the battery. The simulation results show that the proposed method can rapidly respond to variations in wind velocity and load power.     

Culture,Progress and the Media: The Shad as Synecdoche in Environmental News Coverage

This essay examined the use of synecdoche in newspaper coverage of a dispute over water rights between the Mattaponi Indians and the city of Newport News, Virginia. The Mattaponi used the shad as a rhetorical trope to explain the tribe's relationship to the river and their fears about the reservoir's impact. The reservoir proponents, however, treated the shad as a representation of the conflict surrounding the reservoir, and this construction was reflected in articles that appeared in The Daily Press, a local daily newspaper. This essay argued that, ultimately, the treatment of a single species as a synecdoche in environmental disputes undermined the Mattaponi's position. The media which are instrumental in defining environmental issues for the public, misinterpreted a rhetorical trope that was proffered as a representation for a complex set of values and instead focused attention on the species itself rather than the values that it represented.     

A sustainability approach for selecting maintenance strategy

Appropriate maintenance can prolong the life of an asset and prevent costly breakdowns that may result in lost production, failed shipping schedules and a decline in customer satisfaction. The goal of this study was to present a comprehensive framework that utilises sustainability metrics based on social, environmental and economic criteria to select an appropriate maintenance strategy among a variety of maintenance strategy alternatives, such as preventive, failure-based, reliability-centred, condition-based and total productive maintenance strategies, for a manufacturing company. The sustainability-based approach may significantly influence the personnel, energy, material and the overall costs in a company. In the first step of this paper, a sustainability-based decision-making structure is proposed for the maintenance strategy selection problem applying the concept of factor analysis to determine the leading factors in each of the sustainability pillars. In the next step, a fuzzy VIKOR framework is used to select the most appropriate maintenance strategy. The provided approach is illustrated using a manufacturing industry case study.     

Hierarchical priority setting for restoration in a watershed in NE Spain, based on assessments of soil erosion and ecosystem services

Maintaining and enhancing ecosystem services through the restoration of degraded ecosystems have become an important biodiversity conservation strategy. Deciding where to restore ecosystems for the attainment of multiple services is a key issue for future planning, management, and human well-being. Most restoration projects usually entail a small number of actions in a local area and do not consider the potential benefits of planning restoration at broad regional scales. We developed a hierarchical priority setting approach to evaluate the performance of restoration measures in a semiarid basin in NE Spain (the Martín River Basin, 2,112 km²). Our analysis utilized a combination of erosion (a key driver of degradation in this Mediterranean region) and six spatially explicit ecosystem services data layers (five of these maps plotted surrogates for soil retention and accumulation, water supply and regulation, and carbon storage, and one plotted a cultural service, ecotourism). Hierarchical maps were generated using a geographic information system that combined areas important for providing a bundle of ecosystem services, as state variables, with erosion maps, as the disturbance or regulatory variable. This was performed for multiple scales, thereby identifying the most adequate scale of analysis and establishing a spatial hierarchy of restoration actions based on the combination of the evaluation of erosion rates and the provision of ecosystem services. Our approach provides managers with a straightforward method for determining the spatial distribution of values for a set of ecosystem services in relation to ecological degradation thresholds and for allocating efforts and resources for restoration projects in complex landscapes.     

Probabilistic risk assessment's use of trees and distributions to reflect uncertainty and variability and to overcome the limitations of default assumptions

Probabilistic risk assessment is an emerging approach to exposure assessment and quantitative cancer and non-cancer risk characterizations. The approach is easily extended to other types of risks and outcomes. A tree, like a decision tree or probability tree, encourages the evaluation of not only the default assumptions but also alternatives to those defaults, and reflects the uncertainty in the current state of knowledge. Trees are used in both the characterization of the dose received by individuals in a potential exposure situation and the characterization of the dose-response relationship for a specified response of concern. Probability distributions are used to reflect the variability in exposure, dose, and dose-response relationships among individuals and over time within individuals. Distributions incorporating variabilities, uncertainties, subjective probabilities, and expert judgments are used to characterize the probabilities of observing an individual in a population with a specified dose from exposure, with a specified probability of a certain adverse health effect for a designated dose, and with a specified probability of a certain adverse health effect (i.e., a specified risk). Some suggestions are given on how a risk manager can incorporate a distributional risk characterization into decision making. Some discussion is included concerning sensitivity analyses and path analyses. The major finding is methodology to explicitly incorporate variability, uncertainty, and alternatives to defaults into exposure, dose-response, and risk characterizations.     

基于二元水循环理论的水资源承载力质量能综合评价

水资源承载力是影响社会经济可持续发展的一个重要因素，水资源承载力的合理评定对于水资源的可持续利用及社会经济的发展规划具有重要指导意义。在“二元水循环”理论的基础上，提出了承载单元的概念，认为水资源是通过承载单元来实现对社会经济和自然环境的承载能力的。承载单元具有系统响应的特点，水资源在承载单元内将经过社会的外体循环及自然的内体循环，之后其水质、水量、水能3个方面的状态都会发生改变，其承载能力也会相应地发生改变。因此，以承载单元为研究对象，建立了质量能构架下水资源承载力的评价指标体系，并对水资源承载力进行了综合评价。最后以昆明市水资源承载力的分析评价为例，说明了该方法的实际应用     

The Essence of a Recycling Economy:Circular Utilization of Resources

By analyzing the relationship between a recycling economy and sustainable development theory, this article puts forward the basic concept of a recycling economy as a dynamic economic operational model, and explains the four basic characteristics. It is stressed that the essential element of a recycling economy is the use of resources circularly. In the end, this article analyzes the phenomena of utilizing the recycling economy concept incorrectly, and sets forth a number of problems that should be noted during the process of developing a recycling economy in China.     

内蒙古乌拉特后旗新兴矿业城市循环经济发展模式研究

内蒙古乌拉特后旗2001年之前一直是国家级贫困县,2003年以来,该旗将矿产资源优势转变为资产优势,通过发展矿业产业经济,一跃成为人均GDP超上海的富裕县,从农牧业为主县转变为工业为主县。这一转变是对草原及生态环境的巨大威胁。通过实地考察,调查研究齐华矿业公司经济发展经验,提出资源综合开发利用与生态平衡发展模式,该模式达到了工业发展起点高、污染破坏最小化的目标,同时经济得到了可持续发展。     

三峡水库水位涨落带土地资源的初步研究

三峡大坝建成后,将在库区两岸形成永久性的水位涨落带。涨落带冬半年为水域,丰半年出露水面成陆,是一种具有多功能的土地资源类型,在夏半年,涨落带成陆面积大,成陆期较长,与同期丰富的光热水资源构成优势组合,使涨落带土地具有较高的生产潜力。对三峡库区水位落带土地资源的质量、数量和分布特点进行分析,在此基础上提出了合理利用的设想。     

Scientific understanding of stakeholders’ behavior in mining community

We attempt to understand, scientifically, how different members of the mining concession, impacted communities, and government authorities behave when a conflicting situation arises. The main purpose of our effort is to start developing a framework for the scientific modeling of stakeholders’ behavior, and we create a reality-driven generic scenario of conflict. We assume that the managers and superintendants of a mining operation currently envision a problem; one that tests the limits of the commitment of the company’s mission statement, and of the spectrum of actions taken which are embedded in the “culture” of the company’s corporate social responsibility. It is an “event” that highlights the nature of an overall problem that the company would like to predict and act proactively: the integration of scientific tools, sustainability, and cultural realities within a mining framework. We adapt an agent-based modeling approach and start with a theoretical understanding of certain social behavior, build a model, and simulate “what if” scenarios to understand its dynamics to gain a better insight of the complexity of a seemingly simple social system of interest.     

Radiocaesium soil-to-plant transfer in tropical environments

In this work, soil-to-plant transfer factors of radiocaesium are predicted based on soil properties such as pH, organic matter content, exchangeable K+ and clay content valid for the tropical environments in Bangladesh, China and Japan, and using a previously published model. Due to insufficient data of soil properties in the selected regions, the average values of pH, organic matter content, exchangeable K+ and clay content were taken as the input model parameters within the ranges given for Asia. Nevertheless, a complete set of soil properties of Japanese soils was used to compare the measured and calculated TF values of radiocaesium for radish. The calculated TF values for radiocaesium are comparable with the measured values especially for leafy parts of a plant. However, calculated values for rice, an important crop in Asia are found to overestimate the measured values due to an overestimate of calculated CECs in soils in the selected regions. The empirical parameters used in the model need to be re-evaluated for the specific part of a plant and/or for a variety of different plants. Alternatively, a general conversion factor for each part of a plant and/or for a variety of different plants for a specific region is suggested for tropical environments.     

中国国家资源环境安全问题初探

作为世界上最大的发展中国家 ,中国资源环境的现实基础表现出明显脆弱的特征。更严重的问题是 ,未来人口的增长和生活水平的提高对现已十分脆弱的国家资源环境安全基础产生着巨大的压力。若在此问题上出现认识和发展政策上的失误 ,便会产生巨大负面效应 ,严重影响中国国家现代化的进程。为此 ,建议 2 1世纪中国可持续发展战略的首要任务应是确保国家资源环境安全的稳定性。     

Calculation of ventilation requirements in the case of intermittent pollution: Application to enclosed parking garages

The ventilation requirements for decontamination are normally determined with a static calculation method. In some cases, the pollutant emission is intermittent, for example in the car park of an office building, where all the cars enter and leave the place nearly at the same time. Generally, in such a case, the volume of the garage is large, consequently the time constant of the system has a high value. So a static approach would no longer stay accurate and a dynamic evaluation is needed. With the help of some assumptions, calculations remain rather simple and results can be plotted on nomonographs or computed on a programmable handheld calculator. The amount of energy saved may appear very large in some cases. A sizing optimization will be required but also remains easy to compute. The paper presents the method of calculation for a single ventilation level and the optimization of a two-level ventilation.     

A procedure to estimate worst-case air quality in complex terrain

Using a straightforward synoptic climatological analysis scheme, it is shown that the potential for an area to experience air quality degradation due to local sources is highest under polar subtropical highs. With respect to polar highs, the problem is most severe when the sun angle is low and snow covers the ground, and the polar high persists for a long period of time. A simple algorithm is introduced which is designed to estimate worst-case impact in a trapping valley. The potential for the accumulation of air pollution in such valleys due to the persistence of a polar high in a region, is ignored in current regulatory air quality assessments. Trapping valleys and synoptic flow stagnation often occur in wilderness areas. Refined air quality assessments are shown to be possible using a mesoscale meteorological model and a pollution dispersion model. These tools permit quantitative assessments of pollution build-up from local sources as a result of the recirculation of the local air. This tool, along with the synoptic climatological classification scheme, also permits an evaluation of the fractional contribution of long range versus local sources in the air quality degradation in a region. Areas near the center of a polar or subtropical surface high pressure system, for instance, appear to be dominated by local sources, if they exist, whereas in the vicinity of extratropical cyclones, long-range transport is usually much more important.     

Full-spectrum analysis of natural gamma-ray spectra

In this paper, a new system to measure natural gamma-radiation in situ will be presented. This system combines a high-efficiency BGO scintillation detector with full-spectrum data analysis (FSA). This technique uses the (nearly) full spectral shape and the so-called 'standard spectra' to calculate the activity concentrations of 40K, 232Th and 238U present in a geological matrix (sediment, rock, etc.). We describe the FSA and the determination of the standard spectra. Standard spectra are constructed for various geometries and a comparison in intensity and shape will be made. The performance of such a system has been compared to a more traditional system, consisting of a NaI detector in combination with the 'windows' analysis. For count rates typically encountered in field experiments, the same accuracy is obtained 10-20 times faster using the new system. This allows for shorter integration times and hence shorter measurements or a better spatial resolution. The applicability of such a system will be illustrated via an example of an airborne experiment in which the new system produced results comparable to those of much larger traditional systems. This paper will conclude with a discussion of the current status of the system and an outlook for future research.     

Providing sound theoretical roots to sustainability science: systems science and (second-order) cybernetics

After its infant stage, a new science usually starts reflexing on its identity and theoretical roots. Sustainability science is not an exception, and the needs of self-reflection are even more pressing because of its inter- and trans-disciplinary characters, which involve a plenty of different approaches, theories and practices. In fact, such a variety does not provide a consistent ground for its future development. Without a solid grounding on a reliable base, the plethora of different theories that currently crowds its arena could in the near future produce a rejection from disciplinary specialized researchers, thus confining sustainability science to a scientific fad. Convincing theoretical roots can be found in systems science and cybernetics, and in particular second-order cybernetics, once amended from autopoiesis theory and radical constructivism, which raise serious doubts of validity and applicability. If sustainability science acknowledged its systemic and cybernetic nature and adopted second-order cybernetics in its amended version, it would gain a powerful reference paradigm and a theoretical common denominator and language to support its researchers and facilitate their knowledge exchange. From their part, systems science and cybernetics would be better understood and embraced as powerful sources of knowledge for understanding modern challenging problems, and second-order cybernetics, after decades of scarce relevance for other scientific disciplines, would be revitalized and would finally evolve adequately in a promising science and social practice.     

The cradle of the city: the environmental imprint of Brussels and its hinterland in the High Middle Ages

As a popular assumption, the cities are considered to exert a major impact on their hinterland. In fact, little is known about this imprint on the earlier period. This paper will thus try to delineate as far as possible urban and rural contributions to the imprint by using a cause and effect analysis. The paper argues that the birth of second generation cities like Brussels is the result of a demographic and economic process occurring in the rural environment. Above all in a second phase, once the process of human concentration within the city initiated and the town became a market center and a consumer power, rural developments changed under the urban imprint: at that moment the city imposed a certain spatial structure on the rural system with intensive and high profitability cultures replacing extensive practices.