Geography and Sustainability最新文献

Equal access to social infrastructures is a fundamental prerequisite for sustainable development, but has long been a great challenge worldwide. Previous studies have primarily focused on the accessibility to social infrastructures in urban areas across various scales, with less attention to rural areas, where inequality can be more severe. Particularly, few have investigated the disparities of accessibility to social infrastructures between urban and rural areas. Here, using the Changsha–Zhuzhou–Xiangtan urban agglomeration, China, as an example, we investigated the inequality of accessibility in both urban and rural areas, and further compared the urban-rural difference. Accessibility was measured by travel time of residents to infrastructures. We selected four types of social infrastructures including supermarkets, bus stops, primary schools, and health care, which were fundamentally important to both urban and rural residents. We found large disparities in accessibility between urban and rural areas, ranging from 20 min to 2 h. Rural residents had to spend one to two more hours to bus stops than urban residents, and 20 min more to the other three types of infrastructures. Furthermore, accessibility to multiple infrastructures showed greater urban-rural differences. Rural residents in more than half of the towns had no access to any infrastructure within 15 min, while more than 60% of the urban residents could access to all infrastructures within 15 min. Our results revealed quantitative accessibility gap between urban and rural areas and underscored the necessity of social infrastructures planning to address such disparities.

Steep-slope cropland plays a vital role in food production, economic development, ecosystem diversity, and European cultural heritage. However, these systems are susceptible to extreme weather events. The 2022 summer drought significantly impacted European agriculture, but the specific effects on steep-slope crops remain uncertain. Clarifying this is essential for comprehending similar future events and for implementing effective water management strategies to ensure the sustainability of steep-slope agriculture and associated ecosystem services. This study quantitatively analyzes the spatial distribution of twelve major European steep-slope (>12%) crops and assesses agricultural drought severity during the 2022 events using open-access spatial data. The satellite-based Vegetation Health Index (VHI) is utilized to identify critical hotspots. Results show that olive grove is the most widespread crop in steep slope agriculture (34% of total area), followed by wheat (24%), maize (16%), and vineyard (11%). Almost half of the steep-slope agriculture in Europe suffered drought during summer 2022. Vineyards were hardest affected at 79%, primarily in northern Portugal, northern Spain, southern France, and central Italy. Sunflowers followed at 62%, mainly in Spain, central Italy, southern France, and northern Romania. Olive groves ranked third at 59%, with the most impact in northern Portugal, southern and central Spain, and southern Italy. Maize was also significantly affected at 54%. In this paper, we therefore highlight the need to increase steep-slope agriculture resilience by improving water management and promoting sustainable land practices.

In the context of economic globalization, while multinational enterprises from developed countries occupy a high-end position in the global value chain, enterprises from developing countries are often marginalized in the world market. In China, resource-based state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are tasked with the mission of safeguarding resource security, and their internationalization development ideas and strategic deployment are significantly and fundamentally different from those of other non-state-owned enterprises and large multinational corporations. This study provides ideas for the globalization policies of enterprises in developing countries. We consider J Group in western China as a case and discuss its productive investment and global production network development from 2010 to 2019. We found that J Group was ‘partly’ globalized, and there are multiple core nodes with the characteristics of centralized and decentralized coexistence in the production network; in addition, the overall layout centre shifted to Southeast Asia and China; however, its global production was restricted by the enterprise’s investment security considerations, support and restrictions of the home country, political security risk of the host country, and sanctions from the West. These findings provide insights for future research: under the wave of anti-globalization and ‘internal circulation as the main body’, resource SOEs should consider the potential risk of investment, especially keeping the middle and downstream industrial chain in China as much as possible.

The Anthropocene era is characterized by the escalating impact of human activities on the environment, as well as the increasingly complex interactions among various components of the Earth system. These factors greatly affect the Earth’s evolutionary trajectory. Despite notable strides in sustainable development practices worldwide, it remains unclear to what extent we have achieved Earth sustainability. Consequently, there is a pressing need to enhance conceptual and methodological frameworks to measure sustainability progress accurately. To address this need, we developed an Earth Vitality Framework that aids in tracking the Earth sustainability progress by considering interactions between spheres, recognizing the equal relationship between humans and nature, and presenting a threshold scheme for all measures. We applied this framework at global and national scales to demonstrate its usefulness. Our findings reveal that the current Earth Vitality Index is 63.74, indicating that the Earth is in a “weak” vitality. Irrational social institutions, unsatisfactory life experiences and the poor state of the biosphere and hydrosphere have remarkably affected the Earth vitality. Additionally, inequality exists between high-income and low-income countries. Although most of the former exhibit poor human-nature interaction, all of them enjoy good human well-being, while the opposite is true for the latter. Finally, we summarize the challenges and possible options for enhancing the Earth vitality in terms of coping with spillover effects, tipping cascades, feedback, and heterogeneity.

This study’s goal is to present a dynamic portrait of the farm-buildings environment in Occitania, in Southern France, in order to better identify the transitions underway in agri-food chains. To this end, we undertook a territorial diagnosis based on actor statements, using 28 semi-structured interviews across Occitania. This diagnosis was enriched by graphic modelling, which enabled the spatialization of the dynamics described. We show that the process of standardisation of farm buildings prevails in the majority of the territories studied. This phenomenon has intensified in recent years with the development of vast photovoltaic-roofed sheds, accentuating the farmland conversion and soil sealing. At the same time, in areas with strong environmental, landscape and heritage contexts, a ‘new adventure in farm buildings’ (2022 survey) is taking shape. It is primarily driven by local short food chains, which rely on self-construction, repurposing and refurbishment, the sharing of tools and equipment, and which favour the use and reuse of local resources. This study shows that farm-buildings dynamics crystallise many challenges confronting the reterritorialisation of agriculture and food production.

New rainfall records were registered in the southeastern region of Brazil during February 2023. The amount of rain in the north coast region of the State of São Paulo was more than 650 mm in less than two days. Landslides and tragedies with a socioeconomically vulnerable population marked this climatic extreme. The country has a regulatory system that suggests the elaboration and implementation of municipal public policies aimed at territorial organization, environmental conservation, and the prevention of disasters induced by natural hazards. In addition, both federal and state funds earmarked for such hazard's prevention have been underutilized over the last decade. In addition to this current devastating climate episode, other events were registered in this decade, reinforcing that financial governance is a key challenge to face the climate crisis in Brazil. The predicted future extreme events in different regions of Brazil will require a different governance system to minimize social inequality, seek sustainable alternatives for urban environments and manage to adapt cities for the challenges posed by climate change.

Regional inequality significantly influences sustainable development and human well-being. In China, there exists pronounced regional disparities in economic and digital advancements; however, scant research delves into the interplay between them. By analyzing the economic development and digitalization gaps at regional and city levels in China, extending the original Cobb-Douglas production function, this study aims to evaluate the impact of digitalization on China’s regional inequality using seemingly unrelated regression. The results indicate a greater emphasis on digital inequality compared to economic disparity, with variable coefficients of 0.59 for GDP per capita and 0.92 for the digitalization index over the past four years. However, GDP per capita demonstrates higher spatial concentration than digitalization. Notably, both disparities have shown a gradual reduction in recent years. The southeastern region of the Hu Huanyong Line exhibits superior levels and rates of economic and digital advancement in contrast to the northwestern region. While digitalization propels economic growth, it yields a nuanced impact on achieving balanced regional development, encompassing both positive and negative facets. Our study highlights that the marginal utility of advancing digitalization is more pronounced in less developed regions, but only if the government invests in the digital infrastructure and education in these areas. This study’s methodology can be utilized for subsequent research, and our findings hold the potential to the government’s regional investment and policy-making.

The world is facing dramatic challenges related to environmental sustainability at an accelerating pace. In this context, the field of economic geography (EG) has been playing an important role in understanding both the socioeconomic and technological dimensions of these challenges, as it deals with a variety of complementary notions and perspectives. Departing from this lens, our aim is to explore a conceptual framework that can help us to understand environmental changes relating to multi-dimensional territorial development, notably in economic contexts where inequality is high, and stratification based on hierarchies regulate social and economic life. Based on the territory concept, we propose the original notion of a hierarchical regional innovation system (HRIS) that emphasises the pervasive role of hierarchies (powers) in regional innovation systems and illustrate its value with evidence and case studies from extant literature on sustainability transitions. The HRIS can help us understand and promote development paths considering the contribution of inclusive eco-innovations (another original conceptual amalgam). Through some empirical cases from other studies in low-carbon transitions, we show the application of the HRIS (and inclusive eco-innovation) framework. In conclusion, we provide incentives to explore new regional innovation systems, alongside the HRIS, adapted to different regions worldwide and centred on the inclusiveness of people and places.

Long-term exposure to high surface ozone (O₃) concentrations, a complex oxidative atmospheric pollutant, can adversely impact human health. Based on O₃ monitoring data from 261 cities worldwide in 2020, generalized additive model (GAM) and spatial data analysis (SDA) methods were applied in this study to quantitatively evaluate the spatiotemporal distribution of O₃ concentration, exposure risk, and dominant meteorological factors. Results indicated that over 40% of the cities worldwide were exposed to harmful O₃ concentration ranges (40–60 µg/m³), with most cities distributed in China and India. Moreover, significant seasonal variations in global O₃ concentrations were observed, presenting as summer (45.6 µg/m³) > spring (47.3 µg/m³) > autumn (38.0 µg/m³) > winter (33.6 µg/m³). Exposure analysis revealed that approximately 12.2% of the population in 261 cities were exposed to an environment with high O₃ concentrations (80–160 µg/m³), with about 36.32 million people in major countries. Thus, the persistent increase in high O₃ levels worldwide is a critical factor contributing to threats to human health. Furthermore, GAM results indicated temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed as primary determinants of O₃ variability. The synergy of meteorological factors is critical for understanding O₃ changes. Our findings are important for enforcing robust air quality policies and mitigating public risk.

The application of biofertilizers is becoming an inevitable trend to substitute chemical fertilizers for sustainable agriculture. To better understand the development of biofertilizers from 1980 to 2022, we used bibliometric mining to analyze 12,880 journal articles related to biofertilizer. The network cooccurrence analysis suggested that the biofertilizers research can be separated into three stages. The first stage (1980–2005) focused on nitrogen fixation. The second stage (2006–2015) concentrated on the mechanisms for increasing plant yield. The third stage (2016–2022) was the application of biofertilizers to improve the soil environment. The keyword analysis revealed the mechanisms of biofertilizers to improve plant-growth: biofertilizers can impact the nutritional status of plants, regulate plant hormones, and improve soil environments and the microbiome. The bacteria use as biofertilizers, included Pseudomonas, Azospirillum, and Bacillus, were also identified through bibliometric mining. These findings provide critical discernment to aid further study of biofertilizers for sustainable agriculture.