Qingmu Su

Traditional evaluation systems in the current process of urban–rural integration are guided by the goal of “equalization.” They predominantly focus on material facilities and services while neglecting both the integration of socio-cultural dimensions and the disparities between urban and rural areas. Consequently, they are ill-equipped to systematically assess or facilitate the formation of urban–rural communities. To address this gap, this study, grounded in community theory, constructs a county-level comprehensive evaluation framework for urban–rural equivalence that integrates the three dimensions of “material, service, and social” spheres, encompassing material infrastructure, socioeconomic services, and cultural identity. This framework consists of three dimensions, seven criteria, and twenty-one indicators, which are operationalized through statistical data, questionnaire surveys, and field investigations. An empirical application to Xiapu County, Fujian Province, yields a composite urban–rural equivalence index of 0.8184, indicating a moderate level of equivalence, with relatively balanced development across the three dimensions. Furthermore, diagnostic analysis reveals that the key bottlenecks constraining progress toward a higher level of equivalence are not absolute resource shortages but rather the organizational efficiency of spatial linkages, the grassroots-level transmission capacity of public services, and deficiencies in social identity and public participation. Accordingly, differentiated planning response pathways are proposed from the three perspectives of territorial community, governance community, and relational community. By constructing a multidimensional comprehensive evaluation framework, this study advances urban–rural equivalence assessment from mere “disparity description” toward “mechanism diagnosis,” thereby offering a more systematic and operationally feasible evaluation tool and strategic reference for county-level urban–rural integration.

Global climate change has emerged as a critical challenge for human society in the 21st century. As hubs of population and economic activity, urban and rural areas are increasingly exposed to complex and compounded disaster risks. To systematically evaluate the role of educational intervention in climate adaptability capacity building, this study employs a case study approach, focusing on the “Climate Change Adaptation Education and Teaching Alliance Program” launched in Taiwan in 2014. Through a comprehensive analysis of its institutional structure, curriculum, alliance network, and practical activities, the study explores the effectiveness of educational innovation in cultivating climate resilience talent. The study found that the program, through interdisciplinary collaboration and a practice-oriented teaching model, successfully integrated climate adaptability content into 57 courses, training a total of 2487 students. Project-based learning (PBL) and workshops significantly improved students’ systems thinking and practical abilities, and many of its findings were adopted by local governments. Based on these empirical results, the study proposes that urban and rural planning education should be promoted in the following ways: first, updating teaching materials to reflect regional climate characteristics and local needs; second, enhancing curriculum design by introducing core courses such as climate-resilient planning and promoting interdisciplinary collaboration; third, enriching hands-on learning through real project cases and participatory workshops; and fourth, deepening integration between education and practice by establishing multi-stakeholder partnerships supported by dedicated funding and digital platforms. Through such an innovative educational framework, we can prepare a new generation of professionals capable of supporting global sustainable development in the face of climate change. This study provides a replicable model of practice for education policymakers worldwide, particularly in promoting the integration of climate resilience education in developing countries, which can help accelerate the achievement of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG11) and foster interdisciplinary collaboration to address the global climate crisis.

Whether the new type of urbanization implemented in China in the past decade has been effective in regulating urbanization and balancing human development and environmental protection remains to be verified. Therefore, this study develops a framework for assessing population-urbanization–ecological environment interactions by combining the coupling coordination degree model and the decoupling index. Firstly, the proposed framework establishes an indicator system of population, economy, society, space, environmental pressure, ecological governance, ecological status, and ecological services based on two sets of national census data; secondly, this study combines the coupling coordination degree model and decoupling index to comprehensively understand the coupling coordination relationship and the decoupling relationship of the population–urbanization–ecological environment across time and space. Overall, this study contributes to a deepened understanding of coupled population–urbanization–ecological environment interactions and provides a scientific basis for effective guidance on urban–rural management and the balance between human development and environmental protection.

Facing the increasingly uncertain climate change, people are paying more and more attention to climate justice in urbanization. Climate change has intensified the vulnerability of cities and may have a greater impact on vulnerable groups. Therefore, this research constructed a framework to explore the coupling relationship between flood risk and population vulnerability from the perspective of climate justice. In this framework, the indicators of population vulnerability and population resilience were built. Then, the flood risk was identified through the relationship of inundation potential. Furthermore, the coupling coordination degree model was used to calculate the coupling between population vulnerability and flood risk, and the coupling between population resilience and flood risk. Finally, the driving factors of urbanization contributing to such coupling were analyzed through the Tobit model. The specific conclusions are (i) the study area shows vulnerable groups more likely to live in areas with high flood risk, and (ii) vulnerable groups are susceptible to the impact of population density and development intensity, while relatively wealthy groups are susceptible to the impact of the level of economic development and urban built environment. The results contribute to a better understanding of spatial inequalities in flood risk and population vulnerability, and climate injustice.

With the development of the division of labor in product value chains and the specialization of urban functions, the network link structure model among cities is being reshaped. Studying the structure of urban networks and its related theories in the context of scale, place and policy is still an open area. This study constructs a research framework to study the urban network formed by the synergy of scale, place and policy. It mainly takes enterprises in different industries in different provinces as the empirical scale and object, and uses methods such as a social network and Geo Detector to analyze the characteristics and influencing factors of the provincial network relationship mode of enterprises among cities. The main findings are as follows. (1) Firstly, the urban network linkage in general shows strong coastal centrality and small-world network characteristics. The urban network linkages reflected by different types of enterprises all have obvious spatial directionality and polarization effects. (2) Coastal cities have strong centrality, and the specialized division of urban functions emerges, with large cities becoming a concentration area for different types of corporate headquarters, while small- and medium-sized cities carry a large number of processing and assembly enterprises. (3) The networks of different types of enterprises have different sensitivity to each influencing factor. For example, emerging industries have the strongest correlation with the economic scale and social services; manufacturing industries are most influenced by the public services, administrative level and development zone level; and service industries are most influenced by science and technology expenditure and the same metropolitan area. In conclusion, this study contributes to the understanding of network heterogeneity at the provincial scale and provides policy support for the local governance scale, as well as promotes the expansion of the urban network theory to network governance applications in the “flow space”.

With the rapid development of urbanization, cities need more external resources to meet their ultimate demand, which leads to the transfer of land use function between urban and rural areas. How to measure the urban–rural land use coupling remains to be studied. In addition, due to the difficulty in evaluating the unequal development and coupling between urban and rural areas, resource-consuming regions often evade their responsibility for environmental pollution, resulting in unfair allocation of invested resources. Therefore, a framework for the allocation of resources invested in ecological governance was built from the perspective of urban–rural land use coupling. This framework made clear the urban–rural coupling and applied Gini coefficient to judge the overall imbalance in the region. According to the unbalanced structure of the region, the allocation framework based on the location quotient was used to redistribute the resources invested in ecological governance, and the attribution of responsibility was made clear, which can promote regional fairness. The main conclusions are: (I) Taiwan’s overall urban–rural coupling is 8.3, that is, every hectare of land development in Taiwan requires 8.30 hectares of ecological land to meet development needs. The urban area needs to rely heavily on the ecological resources provided by the rural area. (II) The environmental problems of the urban area need to be solved by the urban area itself, while the rural area requires the urban area to be responsible for its ecological governance, and it needs to be responsible for the resource consumption of the external systems. This research provides a new perspective for the research on urban–rural coupling and resource allocation.

At present, nearly half of the population of China live in water-deficient areas where water needs to be transferred from surrounding or remote water sources to meet local water demands. Although the water transfer project has alleviated the demands for water in the water-deficient areas, and brought water-supply income to water source regions, it has also posed some cross-regional negative impacts, including the changes in the original ecology within the water source, the impacts on the downstream water demands, and the risk of biological invasion in the distant water receiving areas. Therefore, it can be seen that the impact of water transfer is complicated and will be manifested in various aspects. The Middle Route of China’s South–North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP-MR), as the world’s largest cross-watershed water transfer project, exerts particularly important effects on regional sustainable development; however, it also produces complex interactions within the ecological environment itself, downstream and in the distant water receiving cities. Thus, this work attempts to apply a metacoupling analysis framework of water transfer to explore the ecological interaction of water transfer in SNWTP-MR on each system. The metacoupling framework can be divided into intracoupling, pericoupling and telecoupling. This study focuses on the analysis of the causes and effects of the intracoupling, pericoupling and telecoupling of SNWTP-MR from the perspective of ecological values and ecological risks. We found that the coupling of water transfer brings about 23 billion yuan of ecological service value to the water source annually, but also increases the internal ecological risk index by 9.31%, through the calculation of changes in land use; secondly, the power generation benefit significantly increases, and the flood control standards have shifted from once-in-20 years to once-in-a-century. However, the ecological risks are also significant, such as poor water quality, eutrophication of water resources, competition for water between industry and agriculture, deterioration of waterway shipping, and threats to biodiversity, etc. Considering only water supply, the population carrying capacity of the water resource in distant water receiving cities is increased by 16.42 million people, which enhances the value of water resources and creates a cross-regional green ecological landscape belt. Nevertheless, the biological invasion and water pollution have greatly affected the safety of water supply. It can be seen that the cross-regional water transfer does not always damage the interests of the sending system and the spillover system while benefiting the receiving system; its impacts are complex and variable. Through this paper, it is hoped to provide a reference for the analysis of the ecological compensation, resource development and allocation in SNWTP-MR by revealing the metacoupling relationship of SNWTP-MR. This paper will provide new ideas for researching the metacoupling relationship, thereby offering valuable reference for the study of the interaction generated by large-scale water transfer.

The impact of climate change in recent years has caused considerable risks to both urban and rural systems. How to mitigate the damage caused by extreme weather events has attracted much attention from countries in recent years. However, most of the previous studies on resilience focused on either urban areas or rural areas, and failed to clearly identify the difference between urban and rural resilience. In fact, the exploration of the difference between the resilience characteristics of cities and villages under climate change can help to improve the planning strategy and the allocation of resources. In this study, the indicators of resilience were firstly built through a literature review, and then a Principal Component Analysis was conducted to construct an evaluation system involving indicators such as “greenland resilience”, “community age structure resilience”, “traditional knowledge resilience”, “infrastructure resilience” and “residents economic independence resilience”. Then the analysis of Local Indicators of Spatial Association showed some resilience abilities are concentrated in either urban or rural. Binary logistic regression was performed, and the results showed urban areas have more prominent abilities in infrastructure resilience (the coefficient value is 1.339), community age structure resilience (0.694), and greenland resilience (0.3), while rural areas are more prominent in terms of the residents economic independence resilience (−0.398) and traditional knowledge resilience (−0.422). It can be seen that urban areas rely more on the resilience of the socio-economic structure, while rural areas are more dependent on their own knowledge and economic independence. This result can be used as a reference for developing strategies to improve urban and rural resilience.