Rong Sheng

Intensive farming in urban suburbs often causes habitat loss, soil erosion, wastewater discharge, and agricultural productivity decline, threatening long-term benefits for the local community. We developed a nature-based solution for sustainable land restoration by establishing “Green Treasure Island” (GTI). The aim of this study is to evaluate the ecological restoration effectiveness of GTI and explore its feasibility and replicability for future applications. The core eco-functional zone of GTI—a 7 hm² forested wetland—embedded a closed-loop framework that integrates land consolidation, ecological restoration, and sustainable land utilization. The forested wetland efficiently removed 65% and 74% of dissolved inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural runoff, raised flood control capacity by 22%, and attracted 48 bird species. Additionally, this biophilic recreational space attracted over 3400 visitors in 2022, created green jobs, and promoted local green agricultural product sales. Through adaptive management and nature education activities, GTI evolved into a landmark that represents local natural–social characteristics and serves as a publicly accessible natural park for both rural and urban residents. This study demonstrates the feasibility of creating GTI for improving ecosystem services, providing a practical, low-cost template that governments and local managers can replicate in metropolitan rural areas worldwide to meet both ecological and development goals.

This paper studies environmental policy integration (EPI) in eco-city/island, building an empirical model to quantify EPI levels based on decoupling analysis. EPI integration levels have been highlighted but have seldom been quantitatively probed in existing academia. It attempts to identify whether EPI, especially its prioritization, is approached in Chongming eco-city/island and identify the factors for it to be achieved. The four-quadrant decoupling model is applied and further operationalized temporally and spatially. Results show that Chongming had a strong prioritized EPI in four consecutive years in the examined years of 2012–2018 despite fluctuations in integration levels. Spatially in its 18 towns, 7 towns have prioritized EPI and one has strongly prioritized EPI, indicating optimistic empirical evidence for an eco-city/island. Contributing factors are discussed, such as EPI levels embodied in the distributed spatiality and time intervals, isolated bounded spatiality and functional symbiosis, and offsetting high costs with multi-level support.

The rapid growth of China’s renewable energy market and production capacity has attracted worldwide attention. Environmental policy integration in the energy sector and the institutional background behind this growth have seen little examination. In this paper, we present an assessment of environmental policy integration (EPI), attempting to reveal how the institutional factors facilitate EPI in the energy sector of China. A qualitative analytical framework involving normative, organizational, and procedural dimensions, incorporating multiple pieces of quantitative evidence, was applied. The results show that an ambitious and long-term normative vision covering political will, social backing, and cultural foundation in China is indispensable to the EPI process in the energy sector. The energy agency’s trans-sector cooperation in policy-making has been established to overcome the sectoral compartmentalization. China’s EPI in energy has a relatively complete and stable regulating system but, at the same time, it is expected to obtain more benefits from market cultivation and public participation. In this process, advantages such as the co-evolution of the green energy innovation, market, and society do exist; however, this market-oriented approach may bring the risk of economic and societal disturbances when interest-driven production capacity growth far surpasses market and societal requirements. This potential risk needs to be handled and prevented by strong governmental guidance and support. The continuous ambitious and long-term visioning of EPI, sufficient governmental funds, and a proactive industrial plan for renewable energy, are suggested.

Just as its general theoretical foundation does, the quantitative evaluation of ecological governance does not have a sound research compilation. This study aims to construct the ecological governance evaluation model and determine the indicator weights, premised on quantitative methods. The evaluation model is expected to embody the new features of the contemporary ecological governance, especially the metropolitan background and regional functions. Given the previous studies and conceptualizations, it is proposed based on (1) fundamental socio-economic development, (2) ecological environment quality, (3) ecological governance and innovation, and (4) regional interconnected functions. The model covers multiple index layers and various indicators, and the entropy weight method is applied to obtain the weights. The results of the specific case in Chongming show the indicator of the number of beds for old-age nursing homes in urban and rural areas, the area of real afforestation, the number of approvals in the project environmental assessment and the freight volume have the biggest weights in each of the four aspects respectively. The level of ecological governance in Chongming Island has been continuously improving, especially in 2015 and 2016, with increases doubling or tripling those of the previous two years. The index values of the four aspects generally showed an upward trend. The comprehensive social economic level and the regional interconnected level continue to grow. The levels of ecological environment quality and the ecological governance and innovation fluctuated in 2013 and 2014, but returned to growth in 2015, and increased significantly in 2016.

In the debates on regional economic analysis, scholars generally reach the consensus that the industrial frame and the occupational mix are not very accurate substitutes for each other. While industry concentration and mix are widely accepted as significant, the independent consideration of occupation has been shown to be important, especially for creativity-concentrated regions. However, neither the industrial nor the occupational mix is separately sufficient to be solely applied to understand the entire regional situation. This paper develops an integrated occupational and industrial structure (IOIS) at the state and also the national level in order to bridge the gap between separate industrial and occupational analytic results. The case of California is used to demonstrate that the integrated approach is a more effective way than either the single occupational or industrial analysis. The further application of this approach to data for the fifty states provides a general view of joint occupational and industrial development across the nation. This approach further links the occupational approach and the industrial development together by providing a new way to measure and identify the regional comparative difference to be able to implement more fruitful policy-making decisions.