International Benefit Transfer Related to Coastal Zones: Evidence from Northeast Asia

International benefit transfer from developed countries is often used to evaluate international aid projects due to the lack of primary study in the policy country, particularly when the policy country is a developing one. Three surveys with the same protocol were carried out around the same time in a coastal city in China, Japan, and South Korea to determine which benefits can be most readily transferred and how much uncertainty accompanies transfers from one country to another. The mean transfer errors were in the range of 97 to 243%. The benefits of economic promotion seem to have more transferability than those of environmental improvement and risk reduction. The benefit transfers from the developed country (Japan) to the developing one (China) had fewer transfer errors than vice versa. These results suggest that more attention needs to be paid to the effect of environmental settings on international benefit transfer.International benefit transfer, choice experiment, coastal zone, Northeast Asia, Environmental Economics and Policy, International Relations/Trade, Q5, R5,

Planning Emergency Shelters for Urban Disasters: A Multi-Level Location–Allocation Modeling Approach

In recent years, cities are threatened by various natural hazards. Planning emergency shelters in advance is an effective approach to reducing the damage caused by disasters and ensuring the safety of residents. Thus, providing the optimal layout of urban emergency shelters is an important stage of disaster management and an act of humanitarian logistics. In order to study the optimal layout of emergency shelters in small mountain cities, this paper constructs multi-level location models for different grades of emergency shelters so as to minimize the travel and construction costs and maximize the coverage rate. Specifically, the actual service of emergency shelters is determined using Geographic Information System (GIS) software and Weighted Voronoi Diagram (WVD) models under the limitation of site capacity, and the space layout is adjusted through combining the actual urban land with the construction position. In this paper, the Jianchuan county seat at Yunnan Province, China, was considered as a case study to illustrate the models of emergency shelters in which the feasibility of the presented models is verified. The proposed research methods and models have provided theoretical basis and a benchmark for the optimal layout of emergency shelters in other small mountain cities

Survey Research for Awareness of Particulate Matter 2.5 in Japan and China : Case of a University in Osaka Prefecture, Okinawa Prefecture, and Nanjing City

This study examined awareness of the health risks posed by PM2.5 in Osaka Prefecture, Okinawa Prefecture, and Nanjing City. A questionnaire survey was administered to respondents of several universities. Respondents were asked to rate their awareness of PM2.5, including the perceived health risk presented by PM2.5 in several countries, fears regarding PM2.5, behavioral intention to take protective actions, effectiveness of their protective actions regarding PM2.5, cost-benefit for their protective actions, and trustworthiness of the information received about PM2.5. The results showed that the respondents of Okinawa Prefecture perceive a higher degree of health risk due to PM2.5 in Japan than the respondents of Osaka Prefecture and Nanjing City. On the other hand, the respondents of Osaka Prefecture and Okinawa Prefecture have a lower level of fear and a lesser amount of behavioral intention to take protective actions than the respondents of Nanjing City. The results suggested that the difference in attitudes toward PM2.5 between the areas is related to differences in their conditions and social systems

Measurement and Influencing Factors of Economic Resilience over a Long Duration of COVID-19: A Case Study of the Yangtze River Delta, China

The COVID-19 pandemic put forward a new test for an economic resilience study. Its long-term and diffusive spatiotemporal characteristics suggest that we need to pay attention to the resilience and spatial heterogeneity of cities over a longer period. This paper applied SARIMA and the performance curve to measure the economic resilience of each city under the pandemic, and explored its influencing factors and spatial heterogeneity using a geodetector and geographically weighted regression model. The results show that: (1) From 2020 to 2022, the economic resilience in the Yangtze River Delta presented a downward to upward to slightly downward trend. High-resilience cities were concentrated in southern Jiangsu, while vulnerable cities were primarily located in western Anhui. The performance of regional core cities was not as strong as in previous research focusing on long-term economic resilience. (2) Fixed-asset investment, related variety, labor supply level, foreign trade dependence, and innovation level were the main influencing factors, on average. The effects of these factors had spatial heterogeneity related to the regional endowment and development quality. The findings suggest that the specificity of public health risks and the lack of coping experience may lead to a general failure of economic resilience. Identifying key factors and current weaknesses in each region can make resilience improvement strategies more targeted and effective

Public willingness to pay for environmental management, risk reduction and economic development: Evidence from Tianjin, China

Following the rapid economic development of China and the improvement of living standards there, the Chinese people are increasing their demand for improvement of environmental quality. This paper reports the results of a choice experiment approach to evaluating the preferences and willingness of residents of Chinese coastal areas to pay for environmental management and regional development. The survey results show that people are most concerned about water quality, fishery development, garbage and oil on the sea and beaches, planting trees and grass in coastal areas, and reducing the risk of earthquakes, high waves, tsunamis, and floods. Respondents were willing to pay 19.7 RMB (Chinese dollars) for a 10% improvement of water quality; 24.6 RMB for a 10% reduction of garbage and oil pollution at the seaside; 24.2 RMB for a 10% improvement in the coastal ecosystem; and 17.3 RMB, 39.0 RMB and 20.7 RMB for 10% reductions in the respective risks of earthquakes, high waves and tsunamis, and floods. The marginal willingness to pay for each goal of coastal management can be used as an important quantitative indicator when allocating social resources for coastal management. The statistically significant interrelationships in the tradeoff between the attributes of coastal management were also clarified. These findings suggest directions for re-allocating social resources and quantify the potential tradeoffs between goals.Public preference Marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) Choice experiment approach Regional sustainability Environmental management China Coastal area

Optimization of Shelter Location Based on a Combined Static/Dynamic Two-Stage Optimization Methodology: A Case Study in the Central Urban Area of Xinyi City, China

Determining how to reasonably allocate shelters in the central area of the city and improve evacuation efficiency are important issues in the field of urban disaster prevention. This paper introduces the methodology and mathematical model from the field of crowd emergency evacuation to shelter location optimization. Moreover, a shelter location optimization method based on the combination of static network analysis and dynamic evacuation simulation is proposed. The construction costs and evacuation times are taken as the objective functions. In the first stage, based on the static network analysis, a circular evacuation allocation rule based on the gravity model is proposed, and the genetic algorithm is then designed to solve the feasible schemes with the lowest shelter construction costs. In the second stage, the evacuation time is taken as the optimization objective. The age differences of refugees, the selection of evacuation routes, and the behavior of adults helping children and the elderly are simulated in a dynamic evacuation simulation model. The traditional social force model is improved to conduct a regional evacuation simulation and determine the optimal scheme with the shortest evacuation time. Finally, the central urban area of Xinyi City, Jiangsu Province, China, is taken as an empirical case

What Drives the Rise of Metro Developments in China? Evidence from Nantong

This paper addresses to the rapid rise of metro developments in Chinese cities to reconsider the official justifications of such mega-projects and the underlying driving forces behind proposal and approval processes. Qualitative approaches were undertaken in this in-depth case study of Nantong’s metro project, through insights into planning documents and evidences gathered from interviews, together with relevant socioeconomic data. Our research findings reveal four major motivations to develop metro projects in China: the city’s expected improvements through the metro system, the local economic power as the essential requirement and source of confidence for project development, the inter-city competition as an invisible factor driving project proposals, and the changing domestic political economy as the direct cause of its approval. As a topic that is frequently studied in the relevant literature and often advocated by metro projects promoters, the local expected achievements in terms of modal shift to public transport, transit-oriented development, economic growth, and tax maximisation are highlighted in this case study. Additionally, in China, inter-city competition and economic-political reasons involved in initiating, promoting, and approving urban mega-projects are also vital to the whole process