Groundwater overexploitation in the North China Plain: A path to sustainability

Over-pumping of aquifers is a worldwide problem, mainly caused by agricultural water use. Among its consequences are the falling dry of streams and wetlands, soil subsidence, die-off of phreatophytic vegetation, saline water intrusion, increased pumping cost and loss of storage needed for drought relief. Stopping or reversing the trend requires management interventions. The North China Plain serves as an example. A management system is set up for a typical county. It contains three components: monitoring, decision support based on modelling, and implementation in the field. Besides all monitoring data, the decision support module contains an irrigation calculator, a box model, and a distributed groundwater model to project the outcomes of different water allocation scenarios. In view of grain security, a solution combines an adaptation of the cropping system with imports of surface water from the South. The Open Access book does not only describe the problem and the path to its solution. It also gives access to nine manuals concerning methods used. They include computer programs and the game Save the Water. The Chinese experience should be of considerable interest to other regions in the world which suffer from over-pumping of aquifers

Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability-Volume 4

Anthropogenic activities are significant drivers of climate change and environmental degradation. Such activities are particularly influential in the context of the land system that is an important medium connecting earth surface, atmospheric dynamics, ecological systems, and human activities. Assessment of land use land cover changes and associated environmental, economic, and social consequences is essential to provide references for enhancing climate resilience and improving environmental sustainability. On the one hand, this book touches on various environmental topics, including soil erosion, crop yield, bioclimatic variation, carbon emission, natural vegetation dynamics, ecosystem and biodiversity degradation, and habitat quality caused by both climate change and earth surface modifications. On the other hand, it explores a series of socioeconomic facts, such as education equity, population migration, economic growth, sustainable development, and urban structure transformation, along with urbanization. The results of this book are of significance in terms of revealing the impact of land use land cover changes and generating policy recommendations for land management. More broadly, this book is important for understanding the interrelationships among life on land, good health and wellbeing, quality education, climate actions, economic growth, sustainable cities and communities, and responsible consumption and production according to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. We expect the book to benefit decision makers, practitioners, and researchers in different fields, such as climate governance, crop science and agricultural engineering, forest ecosystem, land management, urban planning and design, urban governance, and institutional operation.Prof. Bao-Jie He acknowledges the Project NO. 2021CDJQY-004 supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the Project NO. 2022ZA01 supported by the State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building Science, South China University of Technology, China. We appreciate the assistance of Mr. Lifeng Xiong, Mr. Wei Wang, Ms. Xueke Chen, and Ms. Anxian Chen at School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Chongqing University, China

Sustainable Use of Soils and Water: The Role of Environmental Land Use Conflicts

This book on the sustainable use of soils and water addressed a variety of issues related to the utopian desire for environmental sustainability and the deviations from this scene observed in the real world. Competing interests for land are frequently a factor in land degradation, especially where the adopted land uses do not conform with the land capability (the natural use of soil). The concerns of researchers about these matters are presented in the articles comprising this Special Issue book. Various approaches were used to assess the (im)balance between economic profit and environmental conservation in various regions, in addition to potential routes to bring landscapes back to a sustainable status being disclosed

Optimizing Vegetable Strip Intercropping Systems for Application in the North China Plain - Ecological Research for a Shifting Economy

Honors (Bachelor's)Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/96478/1/kylander.pd

Groundwater overexploitation in the North China Plain: A path to sustainability

Over-pumping of aquifers is a worldwide problem, mainly caused by agricultural water use. Among its consequences are the falling dry of streams and wetlands, soil subsidence, die-off of phreatophytic vegetation, saline water intrusion, increased pumping cost and loss of storage needed for drought relief. Stopping or reversing the trend requires management interventions. The North China Plain serves as an example. A management system is set up for a typical county. It contains three components: monitoring, decision support based on modelling, and implementation in the field. Besides all monitoring data, the decision support module contains an irrigation calculator, a box model, and a distributed groundwater model to project the outcomes of different water allocation scenarios. In view of grain security, a solution combines an adaptation of the cropping system with imports of surface water from the South. The Open Access book does not only describe the problem and the path to its solution. It also gives access to nine manuals concerning methods used. They include computer programs and the game Save the Water. The Chinese experience should be of considerable interest to other regions in the world which suffer from over-pumping of aquifers

River Ecological Restoration and Groundwater Artificial Recharge

Three of the eleven papers focused on groundwater recharge and its impacts on the groundwater regime, in which recharge was caused by riverbed leakage from river ecological restoration (artificial water replenishment). The issues of the hydrogeological parameters involved (such as the influence radius) were also reconsidered. Six papers focused on the impact of river ecological replenishment and other human activities on river and watershed ecology, and on groundwater quality and use function. The issues of ecological security at the watershed scale and deterioration of groundwater quality were of particular concern. Two papers focused on water resources carrying capacity and water resources reallocation at the regional scale, in the context of the fact that ecological water demand has been a significant topic of concern. The use of unconventional water resources such as brackish water has been emphasized in the research in this issue

Agriculture, development and structural change in reform-era China

Market based reforms to China’s agricultural sector, between 1978 and 1984, marked the start of the reform era. The reforms were enormously successful, resulting in dramatic increases in both agricultural productivity and output. The first two chapters of this thesis are an empirical exploration of the consequences of the agricultural reforms for the growth of China’s non-agricultural sector and the pattern of Chinese urbanisation. The third chapter uses the interaction between differential rural income growth and the One Child Policy, to shed light on how declining family size has fuelled the latent demand for sex selective abortion in China and beyond. The first chapter explores the link between agricultural productivity and industrialisation in the context of reform era China. A classic literature argues that, at low levels of development, improvements in agricultural productivity can provide an important stimulus to the nonagricultural sector, however empirical evidence of this is limited. Using a natural experiment provided by China’s agricultural reforms, I show that higher agricultural productivity growth had a substantial positive causal effect on non-agricultural output. I use the predictions of a simple two sector model, which nests the possibility of linkages through demand externalities, the supply of capital, and the supply of labour, to provide additional results indicating that the linkages I observe appear to be driven primarily by increases in the supply of capital. In the second chapter, I ask how higher agricultural productivity affected China’s urbanisation. In 1978, at the time of the reforms, more than 80% of China’s population lived in the countryside. By 2011, fewer than 50% did. Whether agricultural productivity increases the pace of urbanisation is theoretically ambiguous, and depends on whether the effect of higher rural incomes is more than offset by the increased demand for urban goods. I show that increased agricultural productivity not only increased the pace of urbanisation between 1978 and 1995, it also affected the type of cities that formed. Higher agricultural productivity increased the output of the urban service sector, at the expense of the tradable industrial sector. The results are consistent with a simple model where urbanisation and structural transformation are jointly determined. In the third chapter, I use China as a setting to explore the hypothesis that the increase in male-female sex ratios observed in China, and many other parts of the world, over the past fifty years is, at least in part, driven by the demographic transition to smaller family sizes. Since 1979, the One Child Policy has imposed economic, and sometimes non-economic sanctions, for breaching proscribed fertility levels. The economic sanctions have meant that, within a class of households, the 1CP may have constrained the fertility of poor households more than rich ones. Using plausibly exogenous variation in household income, I show that richer, less constrained households, had higher fertility in the wake of the implementation of the One Child Policy. I then show that this increase in fertility is associated with a subsequent decline in sex selection. The decline in sex selection is roughly contemporaneous with the emergence of pre-natal ultrasound which dramatically reduced the costs of sex selective abortion. Together, the results suggest that China’s dramatic decline in fertility in the 1970’s, may have played an important role in fuelling the demand for sex selection from the mid 1980’s onwards

A GIS based approach to investigating the potential of herbaceous bioenergy feedstocks for cellulosic bioethanol production in Nigeria

PhD ThesisCellulosic ethanol provides a global alternative transport fuel to substitute conventional fossil fuels. The Nigerian Biofuel Policy in 2005 mandated the production and blending of gasoline with 10% bioethanol. Although, there have been indications that Nigeria has sufficient land available for 1st generation biofuel production, there is an urgent need to achieve food security for an increasing population. To these effects, this study aimed to investigate the land requirement and production potential of purposely grown herbaceous energy crops for 2nd generation cellulosic ethanol production in the six geo-political zones and states of Nigeria to meet the government Biofuel Policy. In this study, ArcGIS software was first used to identify two target land use classes (grassland and shrubland) with the potential for cellulosic ethanol production. The two land use classes were evaluated both on a regional and state basis. The study further employed a GIS-based multi-criteria decision method to determine land suitability for four herbaceous bioenergy crop species (Alfalfa, Elephant grass, Miscanthus x giganteus and Switchgrass). Suitability analysis was conducted using literature-based criteria weights for temperature, rainfall, soil organic matter, soil pH, slope and elevation by zone and state. The study further integrated Python software with ArcGIS to evaluate biomass productivity of the 4 species, where the NE zone was found to record the overall highest potential across the country, the SW was the highest in the South while SE zone generally possessed the least potential for all species. Estimates of productivity by state showed that Borno is the most potential productive state in the North and Oyo in the South. Lagos, which is largely comprised of built up areas, is the state with the least potential. In terms of crop productivity, elephant grass showed highest production potential followed by Miscanthus x giganteus and switchgrass while the C3 species (Alfalfa) has the least potential. The theoretical ethanol yield based on cellulose content of each bioenergy crop showed that at a national level, elephant grass has the greatest potential of the four species at 338 billion litres production per annum, which can power 735 large-scale cellulosic ethanol processing facilities. Generally, the study demonstrated that Nigeria will require the construction of multiple process facilities in order to be able to sustainably use the potential feedstocks available. Furthermore, the study showed that Nigeria has the potential to produce about 66 billion litres of cellulosic bioethanol per annum from the range of feedstocks evaluated. It is to this effect that the study indicated that Nigeria could potentially exceed the proposed 10% biofuel target of about 2 billion litres per annum using purposely grown herbaceous energy crops for cellulosic ethanol production

Land Use Conflict Detection and Multi-Objective Optimization Based on the Productivity, Sustainability, and Livability Perspective

Land use affects many aspects of regional sustainable development, so insight into its influence is of great importance for the optimization of national space. The book mainly focuses on functional classification, spatial conflict detection, and spatial development pattern optimization based on productivity, sustainability, and livability perspectives, presenting a relevant opportunity for all scholars to share their knowledge from the multidisciplinary community across the world that includes landscape ecologists, social scientists, and geographers. The book is systematically organized into the optimization theory, methods, and practices for PLES (production–living–ecological space) around territorial spatial planning, with the overall planning of PLES as the goal and the promotion of ecological civilization construction as the starting point. Through this, the competition and synergistic interactions and positive feedback mechanisms between population, resources, ecology, environment, and economic and social development in the PLES system were revealed, and the nonlinear dynamic effects among subsystems and elements in the system identified. In addition, a series of optimization approaches for PLES is proposed