Understanding the social impacts of enforcement activities on illegal wildlife trade in China

Illegal wildlife trade enforcement is a cornerstone conservation strategy worldwide, yet we have a limited understanding on its social impacts. Using Chinese online wildlife seizure news (2003–2018), we evaluated the interactions among enforcement operations, news frequency, and social engagement (i.e., whistle-blowing) frequency. Our results showed that intensive enforcement operations, which commenced after 2012, have social impacts by increasing the frequency of all seizure news significantly by 28% [95% Confidence Interval (CI): 5%, 51%] and those via whistle-blowing by 24% [95% CI: 2%, 45%], when compared to counterfactual models where possible confounding factors were accounted for. Furthermore, we revealed the potential interaction between enforcement seizure news with and without social engagement, and the consequential social feedback process. Of the species identified from ‘whistle-blowing’ news, up to 28% are considered as high conservation priorities. Overall, we expanded our understanding of the enforcement impacts to social dimensions, which could contribute to improving the cost-effectiveness of such conservation efforts.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13280-021-01686-9.     

基于群决策的河流允许排污量公平分配博弈模型

为解决河流水质管理中允许排污量的公平分配问题,建立一个由排污者群体决策的博弈模型.其基本原理是在现有被普遍接受的公平分配准则基础上,排污者按照一定的顺序,根据个体利益最大化原则依次选择分配准则并获得相应的允许排污量,同时考虑所有排序方式,求取平均值作为最终分配结果.案例研究结果表明,模型综合考虑了多种分配准则,无需人为给定准则的权重,保证了分配依据和分配过程的公正,由排污者群体决策而得出最终结果,是一种较为公平合理的允许排污量分配方法.模型求解与博弈论的Shapley解法类似,计算量呈随排污者个数阶乘递增趋势.