Energy security usually considers both the stability of energy supply and security of energy use and it is receiving increasing attention globally. Considering the strategic importance and sensitivity to international change of the crude oil supply, we decided to examine China’s energy...

The evaluation of ecosystem health in urban clusters will help establish effective management that promotes sustainable regional development. To standardize the application of emergy synthesis and set pair analysis (EM–SPA) in ecosystem health assessment, a procedure for using EM–SPA models...

Waste management is a distinct practice aimed at reducing its effects on health and the environment and increasing energy and material recovery. The urban waste management industry has been slow to adopt new technologies, such as sanitary landfills and incineration, which enable better treatment...

Threatened by the huge pressure caused by climate change, low-carbon cities have become an inevitable part of urban evolution. It is essential to evaluate urban low-carbon development levels to smoothly promote the construction of low-carbon cities. This paper proposes an evaluation index system...

The use by governments of their purchasing power to achieve social objectives is a practice that dates back to the 19th centuries when regulations were issued in both the USA and England establishing fair wages or maximum working hours per day for firms working under public contracts...

A recent study published by Murphy et al. (2005) reported results of a meta-analysis of hypothetical bias using 28 valuation studies. The authors found a median ratio of hypothetical to actual values of 1.35 but they did not investigate the ratio of scales of the hypothetical and actual value...

Land use and cover change are very complex phenomena, based on relationships among environmental, social and economic factors. Moreover, its analysis could be highly valuable for predicting the effects of land use change and for planning a policy intervention able to steer agricultural...

This study examines how institutional development and state ownership influence corporate cash holdings among Chinese firms. The empirical results reveal that firms in provinces with more developed institutions (non-state-controlled firms) hold more (less) cash reserves than those in provinces...

An overview of energy consumption pattern by available data and the analysis of some relevant aspects of energy policy in rural China are presented in this paper. The most obvious trend is the steady decreased proportion of biomass use, from 70.79% to 30.95%, and increased percentage of coal and...

This paper proposes using an interactive fuzzy satisfying method to solve multi-objective optimization problems in integrated water management of the Yellow River Delta, China. The approach involves economic, social and ecological objectives represented by net returns, water deficiency and...