Yuxiang Ma

PM_2.5 pollution in China is becoming increasingly severe, threatening public health. The major goal of this study is to evaluate the mortality rate attributed to PM_2.5 pollution and design pollution mitigation schemes in a southern district of China through a two-objective optimization model. The mortality rate is estimated by health effect evaluation model. Subjected to limited data information, it is assumed that the meta-analysis method, through summarizing and combining the research results on the same subject, was suitable to estimate the percentage of deaths caused by PM_2.5 pollution. The critical parameters, such as the total number of deaths and the background concentration of PM_2.5, were obtained through on-site survey, data collection, literature search, policy analysis, and expert consultation. The equations for estimating the number of deaths caused by PM_2.5 pollution were established by incorporating the relationship coefficient of exposure to reaction, calculated residual PM_2.5 concentration of affected region, and statistical total base number of deaths into a general framework. To balance the cost from air quality improvement and human health risks, a two-objective optimization model was developed. The first objective is to minimize the mortality rate attributable to PM_2.5 pollution, and the second objective is to minimize the total system cost over three periods. The optimization results demonstrated that the combination of weights assigned to the two objectives significantly influenced the model output. For example, a high weight value assigned to minimizing the number of deaths results in the increased use of treatment techniques with higher efficiencies and a dramatic decrease in pollutant concentrations. In contrast, a model weighted more toward minimizing economic loss may lead to an increase in the death toll due to exposure to higher air pollution levels. The effective application of this model in the Nanshan District of Shenzhen City, China, is expected to serve as a basis for similar work in other parts of the world in the future.

Land-use allocation models can effectively support sustainable land use. A large number of studies solve the problems of land-use planning by constructing models, such as mathematical models and spatial analysis models. However, these models fail to fully and comprehensively consider three uncertain factors of land-use systems: randomness, interval and fuzziness. 33Therefore, through the study of the watershed land-use system, this paper develops a land-use allocation model considering the regional land–society–economy–environment system under uncertain conditions. On the basis of this model, an interval fuzzy two-stage random land-use allocation model (IFTSP-LUAM) combining social, economic and ecological factors is proposed to provide sustainable development strategies at the basin level. In addition, the proposed IFTSP-LUAM takes into account the above three uncertainties and multistage, multiobjective, dynamic, systematic and complex characteristics of typical land-use planning systems. The results showed that the model considers more socioeconomic and ecological factors and can effectively reflect the quantitative relationship between the increase in economic benefits and the decrease in environmental costs of a land-use system. The model was applied to land-use planning of Nansihu River Basin in Shandong Province. The results provided a series of suitable land-use patterns and environmental emission scenarios under uncertain conditions, which can help the watershed environmental protection bureau and watershed land-use decision-makers to formulate appropriate land-use policies, so as to balance social and economic development and ecological protection. The simulation results can provide support for an in-depth analysis of land-use patterns and the trade-off between economic development and ecological environment protection.

The research on land natural resources as the leading factor in the Mekong Delta (MD) is insufficient. Facing the fragile and sensitive ecological environment of MD, how to allocate limited land resources to different land use types to obtain more economic benefits is a challenge that local land managers need to face. Three uncertainties in land use system, interval uncertainty, fuzzy uncertainty, and random uncertainty, are fully considered and an interval probabilistic fuzzy land use allocation (IPF-LUA) model is proposed and applied to multiple planning periods for MD. IPF-LUA considers not only the crucial socio-economic factors (food security, output of wood products, etc.) but also the ecological/environmental constraints in agricultural production (COD discharge, BOD5 discharge, antibiotic consumption, etc.). Therefore, it can effectively reflect the interaction among different aspects of MD land use system. The degree of environmental subordination is between 0.51 and 0.73, the net benefit of land system is between USD 23.31 × 10⁹ and USD 24.24 × 10⁹ in period 1, and USD 25.44 × 10⁹ to 25.68 × 10⁹ in period 2. The results show that the IPF-LUA model can help the decision-makers weigh the economic and ecological benefits under different objectives and work out an optimized land use allocation scheme.