Holistic suitability for regional biomass power generation development in China: An application of matter-element extension model

Research on the sustainable development of agricultural product supply chain in three northeast provinces in China

Background

The sustainable development of the agricultural product supply chain (APSC) is the key to protecting public health.

Methods

This paper explores the sustainable development status of the APSC in three northeast provinces of China from 2007 to 2020 and the development trend in the next 5 years by using the entropy weight-matter-element extension model (MEEM) and autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA), taking into account the background of relatively backward development and the high proportion of agricultural output in these three provinces.

Results

According to the research results, the sustainable development of the APSC in Jilin Province is relatively stable, Heilongjiang Province has made considerable progress in the sustainable development of the APSC in recent years, while Liaoning Province has shown a significant downward trend in recent years in the sustainable development of the APSC, despite a strong development momentum in previous years.

Conclusions

The findings of this paper can be applied to the governance of APSC in other rural areas with uneven development. The assessment also provides guidance on the quality and safety of agricultural products and public health, and raises the awareness of policymakers on the importance of the APSC.

Integrated crop-livestock-bioenergy system brings co-benefits and trade-offs in mitigating the environmental impacts of Chinese agriculture

Agricultural bioenergy utilization relies on crop and livestock production, favouring an integrated crop-livestock-bioenergy production model. Yet the integrated system's exact contribution to mitigating various environmental burdens from the crop production system and livestock production system remains unclear. Here we inventory the environmental impacts of each process in three subsystems at both national and regional scales in China, ultimately identifying key processes and impact categories. The co-benefits and trade-offs in nine impact categories are investigated by comparing the life cycle impacts in the background scenario (crop production system + livestock production system) and foreground scenario (integrated system). Freshwater eutrophication is the most serious impact category in both scenarios. Except terrestrial acidification, the mitigation effects on the other eight impact categories vary from 1.8% to 94.8%, attributed to fossil energy and chemical fertilizer offsets. Environmental trade-offs should be deliberated when expanding bioenergy utilization in the identified critical regions.

Improving the ecological environmental performance to achieve carbon neutrality: The application of DPSIR-Improved matter-element extension cloud model

Ecological environmental issues are global focus problems. Achieving carbon neutrality is a fundamental measure to protect the ecological environment. Government environmental governance plays a key role in the process of moving towards a carbon neutral vision since the externality of the environment. Therefore, it is of great significance for achieving the goal of carbon neutrality to evaluate the governmental ecological environment performance and propose improved suggestions based on the evaluation results. However, most existing evaluation methods have the disadvantages that it is difficult to avoid information distortion and loss during the evaluation process. To overcome these problems, an evaluation model based on a DPSIR-improved matter-element extension cloud model is proposed in this study, which combines the Drivers-Pressures-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) model, the entropy weight method, the cloud model, matter element extension theory, and the cloud entropy optimization algorithm. The ecological environmental performance of China in 2019 was evaluated based on the proposed model, exampling as Jiangsu province. The results showed that the cloud digital eigenvalues of ecological environmental performance was (2.1852, 0.2956, 0.1), indicating that the ecological environmental performance was good level. However, the ambient air quality needed to be improved. To achieve carbon neutrality, suggestions including strengthening propagating, increasing investment, optimizing the industrial structure, and building a modern environmental governance system are proposed.