Mengqiu Cao

As the decarbonisation of transport continues, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs) are attracting increasing attention, particularly in heavy-duty and high-utilisation applications where long operating ranges and rapid refuelling are required. Transferring HFCVs from individual demonstrations to large-scale fleet operation, however, depends on the joint performance of vehicles, hydrogen supply, refuelling infrastructure and operational management. Our study examines the technical and operational feasibility of large-scale hydrogen mobility using the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games as a case study. The analysis covers vehicle deployment and scenario matching, hydrogen production and road distribution, refuelling infrastructure, digital monitoring, fleet coordination, and operational performance under extreme winter and mountainous conditions. More than 1200 HFCVs operated for 52 days across over 80 routes and accumulated more than 3.5 million vehicle-kilometres, supported by 11 hydrogen refuelling stations and approximately 20 t d⁻¹ of hydrogen production capacity. The case study shows that successful fleet operation depended on matching vehicle configurations to transport tasks, coordinating hydrogen supply with refuelling demand, maintaining redundancy across the supply network - and integrating real time monitoring with fleet dispatch. These findings help to identify the main technical and operational conditions for large-scale hydrogen mobility and provide practical guidance for centralised applications, such as public transport, shuttle services and logistics fleets.

Shared micromobility services (SMMs) are increasingly promoted as a scalable pathway to urban transport decarbonisation, yet their capacity for sustainable expansion across automobile-dependent cities remains uncertain. Using operational data from 64 SMMs across the United States, Australia, and New Zealand between 2019 and 2025, we show that SMM activity stays strongly concentrated in urban cores, and growth is driven primarily by supply-side fleet expansion. Importantly, Per-vehicle utilisation remains low in most systems but emerges as the key signal of long-term viability, with surviving and closed systems diverging within the first three quarters after launch, whereas widely available measures of the built environment provide an early diagnostic of whether SMMs are likely to persist and scale sustainably. These findings suggest that the promise of SMMs is constrained by persistent operational and spatial barriers, and offer a basis for more targeted decisions on where and how cities support deployment.

Global climate change has amplified extreme weather events, threatening ecological security and sustainable development. The impact of extreme weather events on sustainable land use (SLU) has attracted increasing attention. While previous studies have focused on the average effect, the question of whether its impacts vary across SLU levels remains unexplored. This knowledge gap is particularly pronounced in mountainous Chongqing, where complex terrain and urban heat islands interact to compound heterogeneous climate risks. To bridge this gap, we construct an indicator system based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with which to assess the spatio-temporal evolution of SLU across all 38 districts of Chongqing from 2013 to 2023. The results show that Chongqing’s SLU level fluctuated upwards between 2013 and 2023, with high-value areas concentrated in the central urban core areas and regional gaps narrowing. Extreme climate indices exhibited significant spatial heterogeneity, with heat islands in urban areas, cold events in mountainous regions, floods in the southeast and droughts in the central western area. By overcoming average-effect limitations through quantile regression, this study further examines the heterogeneous effects of extreme weather on SLU across different development levels. It finds that simple daily intensity index (SDII) exerted stable negative effects—and the number of heavy precipitation days (R10), very wet days (R95p), monthly maximum value of daily maximum temperature (TXx) and diurnal temperature range (DTR) showed positive effects. While most climate variables exhibited stable effects, a critical finding was the divergent effect of variables such as tropical nights (TR20), which negatively impacted low SLU areas but positively influenced high SLU areas. This mechanistically confirms that regions at different levels of development experience fundamentally distinct impacts from the same climatic stressors. By focusing on uneven regional impacts and identifying region-specific extreme weather types, this study provides empirical support for targeted climate adaptation and balanced land management in mountainous cities.

Social media significantly influences leisure activities and fosters cultural attachment to sustainable travel. This study explores how social media affects travel motives including affective, symbolic, and technological factors and examines their role in promoting sustainable leisure travel behaviours. Using Xiamen as a case study, we employed a mixed methods approach that combined 43 in-depth interviews and six months of Weibo data. The data were analysed using semantic network analysis and sentiment analysis. The results show that affective and symbolic values induced by social media play a key role in driving behaviour change among tourists. Furthermore, the interactivity, customisation, and word-of-mouth features of social media help shape positive attitudes and intentions. Regarding policy implications, we suggest that social media marketing should be directed towards the affective and symbolic aspects of sustainable travel, while data cooperation between social media operators and local governments should be strengthened in order to facilitate sustainable tourist travel.

Flood-induced risks increasingly disrupt interdependent infrastructure systems. However, how these risks propagate, cluster or diverge across interconnected systems is unclear. To bridge this gap, this study constructs a multi-tiered risk-weighted network to disentangle interactions and reveal risk communities. UK-wide flood events from 2003 to 2023 were simulated using CaMa-Flood. Using these simulations, a flood-specific risk resistance surface, incorporating device, spatial, and external disturbance dimensions, was used to construct an adjacency graph for 29,697 EV charging points, yielding a risk-weighted network with 192,862,650 annual edges. This integrated framework enables a unified examination of flood-driven interaction pathways across scales. We find: (1) Flood risk propagation is driven respectively by spatial amplification (63.8%) at the node level, hybrid natural–built coupling (45.3%, 49.6%) at the buffer scale, and impact-driven dynamics (49.0%, 23.6%, 27.0%) at the disturbance layer, representing the relative contributions of entropy-weighted factor groups that form each resistance layer; (2) Risk propagation is governed not by group size, but by the interplay among structural coherence, spatial buffering, and fragmentation constraints across scales; and (3) Risk propagation emerges in fragmented, outward-oriented communities, where spatial geographical interplay, rather than path length, shapes intergroup cascades. These findings highlight multi-scale structural mechanisms driving flood-induced cascade behaviour.

Public electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure is crucial for accelerating EV adoption and reducing transportation emissions; however, disparities in infrastructure access have raised significant equity concerns. This review synthesizes existing knowledge and identifies gaps regarding equity in EV public charging research. Following structured review protocols, 91 peer-reviewed studies from Scopus and Google Scholar were analyzed, focusing explicitly on equity considerations. The findings indicate that current research on EV public charging equity mainly adopts geographic information systems (GIS), network optimization, behavioral modeling, and hybrid analytical frameworks, yet lacks consistent normative frameworks for assessing equity outcomes. Equity assessments highlight four key dimensions: spatial accessibility, cost burdens, reliability and usability, and user awareness and trust. Socio-economic disparities, particularly income, housing tenure, and ethnicity, frequently exacerbate inequitable access, disproportionately disadvantaging low-income, renter, and minority populations. Additionally, infrastructure-specific choices, including charger reliability, strategic location, and pricing strategies, significantly influence adoption patterns and equity outcomes. However, the existing literature primarily reflects the contexts of North America, Europe, and China, revealing substantial geographical and methodological limitations. This review suggests the need for more robust normative evaluations of equity, comprehensive demographic data integration, and advanced methodological frameworks, thereby guiding targeted, inclusive, and context-sensitive infrastructure planning and policy interventions.

As an institutional guarantee of technology and innovation, intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection at the national and supranational level has long been an important focus of economics and politics. However, very few studies have examined IPRs protection in the fields of geography and urban studies. Thus, this study aims to investigate IPRs protection within evolutionary economic geography (EEG) by highlighting the effect of economic transition. Taking Huaihai Economic Zone (HEZ), in China, as a sample, the study uses spatial multi-level modelling to better understand the impacts of the threefold process of economic transition (i.e., decentralisation, marketisation and globalisation) on IPRs protection. Our analysis reveals important new insights including: (1) the horizontal spatial distribution of IPRs protection is uneven both horizontally and vertically, and it has significant spatial hotspots; (2) The driving force of China’s internal marketisation and decentralisation policy positively influences IPRs protection, unlike in the Global North, because strong IPRs protection is not suitable for the economic conditions of countries in the Global South due to the negative effects of globalisation; (3) Economic transition has a major influence on IPRs protection at the prefectural level, but not at the provincial level. The contributions of the study are twofold: theoretically, it is one of the first paper to examine IPRs protection at the sub-national level within the framework of EEG, and to use the triangular process of economic transformation to explain the resulting institutional changes. Methodologically, based on the theoretical underpinnings of our study, we take different administrative levels and autocorrelation into consideration in our model.

Public electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure is crucial for accelerating EV adoption and reducing transportation emissions; however, disparities in infrastructure access have raised significant equity concerns. This systematic review synthesizes existing knowledge and identifies gaps regarding equity in EV public charging research. Following structured review protocols, 91 peer-reviewed studies from Scopus and Google Scholar were analyzed, focusing explicitly on equity considerations. The findings indicate that current research on EV public charging equity mainly adopted geographic information systems (GIS), network optimization, behavioral modeling, and hybrid analytical frameworks, yet lacks consistent normative frameworks for assessing equity outcomes. Equity assessments highlight four key dimensions: spatial accessibility, cost burdens, reliability and usability, and user awareness and trust. Socio-economic disparities, particularly income, housing tenure, and ethnicity, frequently exacerbate inequitable access, disproportionately disadvantaging low-income, renter, and minority populations. Additionally, infrastructure-specific choices, including charger reliability, strategic location, and pricing strategies, significantly influence adoption patterns and equity outcomes. However, existing literature primarily reflects North American, European, and Chinese contexts, revealing substantial geographical and methodological limitations. This review suggests the need for more robust normative evaluations of equity, comprehensive demographic data integration, and advanced methodological frameworks, thereby guiding targeted, inclusive, and context-sensitive infrastructure planning and policy interventions.