China’s industrial gray water footprint assessment and implications for investment in industrial wastewater treatment

Industrial wastewater is the largest contributor of toxic pollutants and third-largest contributor of nutrients to bodies of water in China, and understanding the characteristics of such pollution is important for water pollution control. In this study, the industrial gray water footprint (GWF) of each industry sector in China’s 31 provinces in 2015 was calculated to identify the pollution characteristics of industrial wastewater discharge and determine how to efficiently allocate investment to pollution reduction. We show that the total industrial GWF of China was 300 billion m³ in 2015 and that the major pollutants were petroleum pollutant (PP), ammonia nitrogen (NH₃-N), volatile phenol (VP), and chemical oxygen demand (COD). The water pollution level (WPL) was higher than 1 in Ningxia, Shanxi, Hebei, Tianjin, Shanghai, Henan, and Shandong, indicating that industrial pollution exceeded the carrying capacity of local water bodies in these seven regions. Given equivalent total investment, a scenario that takes the total reduction of the industrial GWF weighted by the WPL in each region as the investment target can better allocate funds to control industrial wastewater pollution in regions with high WPLs relative to a scenario in which investment targets the reduction of the unweighted total industrial GWF. For further industrial GWF reduction in regions with high WPLs, it is crucial to adjust the industrial structure and to upgrade relevant technologies.

     

Spatiotemporal heterogeneity of PM2.5 and its driving difference comparison associated with urbanization in China’s multiple urban agglomerations

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - The development of urban agglomeration further deteriorates the air pollution status arising from urbanization. However, disparities in the...     

How urbanization affects residents’ health risks: evidence from China

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - Continued urbanization requires a deep understanding of how urbanization affects residents’ health risks. This study used regression analysis of...     

Regime shifts and resilience in China’s coastal ecosystems

Regime shift often results in large, abrupt, and persistent changes in the provision of ecosystem services and can therefore have significant impacts on human wellbeing. Understanding regime shifts has profound implications for ecosystem recovery and management. China’s coastal ecosystems have experienced substantial deterioration within the past decades, at a scale and speed the world has never seen before. Yet, information about this coastal ecosystem change from a dynamics perspective is quite limited. In this review, I synthesize existing information on coastal ecosystem regime shifts in China and discuss their interactions and cascading effects. The accumulation of regime shifts in China’s coastal ecosystems suggests that the desired system resilience has been profoundly eroded, increasing the potential of abrupt shifts to undesirable states at a larger scale, especially given multiple escalating pressures. Policy and management strategies need to incorporate resilience approaches in order to cope with future challenges and avoid major losses in China’s coastal ecosystem services.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0692-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Impacts of regional development on emissions in China’s transport sector

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - The CO2 emissions in China’s transport sector increased from 349.00 Mt in 2005 to 723.87 Mt in 2017. Thus, a number of climate change policies...     

Synthetic olive mill wastewater treatment by Fenton’s process in batch and continuous reactors operation

Degradation of total phenol (TPh) and organic matter, (expressed as total organic carbon TOC), of a simulated olive mill wastewater was evaluated by the Fenton oxidation process under batch and continuous mode conditions. A mixture of six phenolic acids usually found in these agro-industrial wastewaters was used for this purpose. The study focused on the optimization of key operational parameters of the Fenton process in a batch reactor, namely Fe²⁺ dosage, hydrogen peroxide concentration, pH, and reaction temperature. On the assessment of the process efficiency, > 99% of TPh and > 56% of TOC removal were attained when [Fe²⁺] = 100 ppm, [H₂O₂] = 2.0 g/L, T = 30 °C, and initial pH = 5.0, after 300 min of reaction. Under those operational conditions, experiments on a continuous stirred-tank reactor (CSTR) were performed for different space-time values (τ). TOC and TPh removals of 47.5 and 96.9%, respectively, were reached at steady-state (for τ = 120 min). High removal of COD (> 75%) and BOD₅ (> 70%) was achieved for both batch and CSTR optimum conditions; analysis of the BOD₅/COD ratio also revealed an increase in the effluent’s biodegradability. Despite the high removal of lumped parameters, the treated effluent did not met the Portuguese legal limits for direct discharge of wastewaters into water bodies, which indicates that coupled chemical-biological process may be the best solution for real olive mill wastewater treatment.     

Evolution of China’s water issues as framed in Chinese mainstream newspaper

There is an urgent need globally to trigger fundamental societal changes in water management away from existing unsustainable paradigms. This paper attempts to understand the evolution of newspaper coverage of water issues in China by analyzing water-related articles in a major national newspaper, the People’s Daily, over the period 1946–2012 using a content analysis approach. The major findings include the following: (1) water issues were in relatively prominent positions in the newspaper; (2) the reporting of water issues in China experienced three stages: 1946 to the middle of 1980s—flood and drought control and water for food production, the middle of 1980s to 1997—water for economic development, and 1998 to the present—water for the environmental sustainability and economic development; (3) the reporting of water issues in the People’s Daily clearly reflected China’s top-down water resources management system, and no “real” public opinions on water were reported during the study period; and (4) the People’s Daily is just a wind vane of Chinese mainstream values and policies on water. The findings supported the realist assumption that the societal value changes on water issues in China were triggered by a range of factors including biophysical pressure (floods and droughts), political campaign (the Cultural Revolution), macro-economic reform (Reform and Opening-up), water institutional arrangement (the Water Law), and water management reform (the No. 1 Central Document on water reform). While there are similarities and differences between this study and other studies, important implications for more sustainable water management are a need to strengthen academic specialists’ and NGO’s voices in the newspaper to create a better informed public, and to stimulate practices toward sustainable water use.     

Could environmental regulations improve the quality of export products? Evidence from China’s implementation of pollutant discharge fee

This study investigates the effect of Chinese environmental regulations on the quality of export products. As the main way for the government to protect the environment, environmental regulations have greatly influenced the production behavior of enterprises. Based on the data of China’s pollutant discharge fee implementation and industrial enterprise-pollution panel data, we find that the government’s environmental regulations have significantly improved the quality of export products, and this conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests. Further analysis shows that the increase in the quality of export products originating from the regulated areas could be attributed to promoting enterprise innovation and reducing resource misallocation. The results in this study provide evidence that the Chinese government could coordinate economic and environmental protection in the new era.

     

Threats to China’s Biodiversity by Contradictions Policy

China has among the highest biodiversities in the world, but faces extreme biodiversity losses due to the country’s huge population and its recent explosive socioeconomic development. Despite huge efforts and investments by the government and Chinese society to conserve biodiversity, especially in recent decades, biodiversity losses may not have been reversed, and may even have been exacerbated by unintended consequences resulting from these projects. China’s centralized approach to biodiversity conservation, with limited local participation, creates an inflexible and inefficient approach because of conflicts between local communities and national administrators over the benefits. Although community-based conservation may be an imperfect approach, it is an essential component of a successful future national conservation plan. Biodiversity conservation should be considered from the perspective of systems engineering and a governance structure that combines centralization with community-level conservation. In this paper, we describe China’s complex challenge: how to manage interactions between humans and nature to find win–win solutions that can ensure long-term biodiversity conservation without sacrificing human concerns.     

The impact of urbanization and consumption patterns on China’s black carbon emissions based on input–output analysis and structural decomposition analysis

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - Urbanization in China has dramatically increased from 39.10 in 2002 to 58.52% in 2017. Studies have discussed the impacts of urbanization and its...     

China’s air pollution reduction efforts may result in an increase in surface ozone levels in highly polluted areas

China, as a fast growing fossil-fuel-based economy, experiences increasing levels of air pollution. To tackle air pollution, China has taken the first steps by setting emission–reduction targets for nitrogen oxides (NO_x) and sulphur dioxide (SO₂) in the 11th and 12th Five Year Plans. This paper uses two models—the Energy–Environment–Economy Model at the Global level (E3MG) and the global Chemistry Transport Model pTOMCAT—to test the effects of these policies. If the policy targets are met, then the maximum values of 32 % and 45 % reductions below ‘business as usual’ in the monthly mean NO_x and SO₂ concentrations, respectively, will be achieved in 2015. However, a decrease in NO_x concentrations in some highly polluted areas of East, North-East and South-East China can lead to up to a 10% increase in the monthly mean concentrations in surface ozone in 2015. Our study demonstrates an urgent need for the more detailed analysis of the impacts and designs of air pollution reduction guidelines for China.     

The impact of natural disasters on China’s macroeconomy

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - This study attempts to construct an econometric model using China’s natural disaster losses and macro-industry development data from 1980 to...     

Variations in seasonal and inter-annual carbon fluxes in a semi-arid sandy maize cropland ecosystem in China’s Horqin Sandy Land

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - Sandy cropland ecosystems are major terrestrial ecosystems in semi-arid regions of northern China’s Horqin Sandy Land, where they play an...     

Climate change impact assessment on Northeast China’s grain production

The international community is paying more attention to climate change because a consensus has been reached that climate change has an adverse effect not only on the environment but also on agriculture. Therefore, in this study, present and future climate datasets (obtained from general circulation models) including atmospheric carbon concentration were used to assess the impact of climate change on grain production for an important base of China (Northeast). An empirical model has been developed using climate and other additional variables (effective irrigation area, fertilizer, and labor force) to assess the effect of climate change on grain production. The results revealed that maximum temperature is a key climate determinant in grain production of the study area. Atmospheric carbon concentration showed a significant impact on grain outputs in most of the cases. During the analysis, it was observed that precipitation displayed a declining trend while an effective irrigation area showed positive non-significant contribution to grain production. Analysis based on different representative concentration pathways exhibited that maximum temperature may contribute negatively to grain production in the future. Overall, the analysis showed that climate change has a significant contribution to grain production. In conclusion, the implications for future research and policymakers have been addressed. Particularly, the importance of considering regional differences in adaptation planning in agricultural regions was also considered.

     

The driving factors and future changes of CO2 emission in China’s nonferrous metal industry

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - As an energy-intensive industry in China, it is critical to promote energy conservation and carbon emission reduction in the nonferrous metal industry...