Measuring sustainability:Development and application of the Inclusive Wealth Index in China

It is increasingly common to use the Inclusive Wealth Index (IWI) to evaluate national sustainability; however, IWI's highly aggregated components and limited regional cases restrict its further application in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study extends the traditional three-component IWI framework into six disaggregated components, namely male/female human capital, advanced/ordinary produced capital, and renewable/non-renewable natural capital. We apply the modified framework to China and evaluate the sustainability performance at the provincial level. The results show that China continues to develop with an annual IWI per capita increase rate of 2.3%. Gender inequality is found to hinder the growth of IWI, whereas advanced product features benefit the growth of IWI. The results also suggest significant heterogeneity in provincial IWI primarily due to differences in economic development stages, geographic locations, and uneven IWI growth. IWI growth is largely driven by wealth accumulation resulting from human capital and advanced produced capital. In contrast, insufficient IWI growth is caused by a substantial amount of ordinary produced capital or a continued decline in natural capital. The study provides a basis for tracking progress toward the SDGs and measuring the heterogeneity of regional socio-economic development in China

Three Essays on Ozone Pollution, Biofuel Production, and Climate Change

Climate change and surface ozone have been proven to impose significant threats on crop productions and the interactions between these two factors further make the issue more complicated. Although the quantification of damages has been well established in the literature, the consideration of ozone-climate interactions is mostly absent from such studies. On the other hand, mitigation is recognized as one of the most important strategies to address climate change challenges and cellulosic ethanol production from biomass is a promising solution. This dissertation covers the above climate change-related topics in three essays. The first essay explores ozone impacts on corn, soybeans, spring wheat, winter wheat, barley, cotton, peanuts, rice, sorghum, and sunflowers in the United States. We also incorporate a variety of climatic variables to investigate potential ozone-climate interactions. The results shed light on future yield consequences of ozone and climate change individually and jointly under a projected climate scenario. Our results suggest that the damages caused by climate change-induced ozone elevation are much smaller than the damages caused by the direct effects of climate change itself. The second essay focuses on climate change and winter wheat, a stable crop that plays a critical role in food security and nutrient balance. We examine potentially differential climatic impacts depending on winter wheat’s growth stages, using data collected from China, the largest wheat producer in the world. We also address the concerns of short- and long-run climate effects and reveal the effects of long-run climate change adaptations. Our findings suggest that reductions in the number of freezing days induced by global warming have strong implications for climate change impacts on winter wheat yields. We find substantial long-run adaptation effects that could reverse the sign of climate impacts on winter wheat. The third essay consists of two parts. We build life cycle analysis models to measure the environmental performance of a proposed Multi-Stream Integrated Biorefinery (MIBR) platform. The goal of the MIBR is to enhance the profitability and sustainability of lignocellulosic biofuel by producing valuable byproducts (i.e., carbon fiber) from lignin-containing biorefinery wastes. We also perform market analysis on carbon fiber to understand the current market and prospective market in the foreseeable future. Market penetration analysis suggests minimal price impacts of MIBR carbon fiber. However, scaling up the platform to a capacity level comparable with a corn ethanol plant will reduce carbon fiber price by 28%, posing challenges to the profitability of lignin-based byproducts

How do weather and climate change impact the COVID-19 pandemic? Evidence from the Chinese mainland

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to expand, while the relationship between weather conditions and the spread of the virus remains largely debatable. In this paper, we attempt to examine this question by employing a flexible econometric model coupled with fine-scaled hourly temperature variations and a rich set of covariates for 291 cities in the Chinese mainland. More importantly, we combine the baseline estimates with climate-change projections from 21 global climate models to understand the pandemic in different scenarios. We found a significant negative relationship between temperatures and caseload. A one-hour increase in temperatures from 25 °C to 28 °C tends to reduce daily cases by 15.1%, relative to such an increase from −2 °C to 1 °C. Our results also suggest an inverted U-shaped nonlinear relationship between relative humidity and confirmed cases. Despite the negative effects of heat, we found that rising temperatures induced by climate change are unlikely to contain a hypothesized pandemic in the future. In contrast, cases would tend to increase by 10.9% from 2040 to 2059 with a representative concentration pathway (RCP) of 4.5 and by 7.5% at an RCP of 8.5, relative to 2020, though reductions of 1.8% and 18.9% were projected for 2080–2099 for the same RCPs, respectively. These findings raise concerns that the pandemic could worsen under the climate-change framework