Role of self-actualization in green production behavior: Evidence from rice smallholders in China.

Understanding who adopt green production and why they choose this strategy is an important issue that needs to be addressed in the context of increasingly severe agricultural pollution. Previous studies have generally investigated subsistence-oriented smallholders, typically employing profit maximization or risk minimization models. However, Chinese farmers have differentiated, and have unique characteristics. This study collected data from 960 random samples of rice farmers and conducted quantitative analysis. The findings reveal that 94.9 % of the farmers had less than 2-ha rice-planting area, and 80.21 % of farmers reported that their purpose of planting rice was for family self-feeding. Furthermore, the new standard to define smallholder based on whether their production purpose is self-feeding or selling and found that non-smallholders had an overall advantage and passed the t-test. Even more non-smallholder (76.32 %) intentionally chose green pesticide than smallholders (66.1 %), but their decision-making logic was different. Binary logistic regression results show that three aspects of self-actualization (environmental, market, and personal) positively and significantly affected the green production behavior of smallholders, but not significant for non-smallholders. This study suggests that in China, where smallholders are the mainstay of agriculture production, green production by smallholders will greatly improve the ecological environment and provide high quality agricultural products.

Single Atoms on a Nitrogen-Doped Boron Phosphide Monolayer: A New Promising Bifunctional Electrocatalyst for ORR and OER.

Efficient oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) bifunctional electrocatalysts have been pursued for decades. Meanwhile, single metal atoms embedded in a two-dimensional material substrate (2D-substrate) have emerged as an outstanding catalyst. Herein, we report on computational ORR/OER efficiencies of a series of single atom catalyst systems, with a nitrogen-doped boron phosphide monolayer (N3-BP) as the 2D-substrate, and with Sc, Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Rh, Pd, Ir, and Pt as the single-atom subject (M). In brief, our density functional theory results show that the overpotentials for ORR/OER are low for CoN3-BP, NiN3-BP, and PtN3-BP, with {ηORR; ηOER} of {0.36; 0.42 V}, {0.29; 0.44 V}, and {0.32; 0.25 V}, respectively. The relevant attributes such as the chemical stability of the 2D-substrate in the ORR/OER environments, immobilization of the single-atom subject on the 2D-substrate, and mechanisms of the ORR/OER activity and the catalyst recovery on the MN3-BP catalysts were carefully examined. The key to the comparative study is how the electronic states of the reaction center near the Fermi level of the catalytic system match the frontier orbitals of ORR/OER reaction intermediates. In short, our method predicts the ORR/OER catalytic efficiencies of novel catalysts via a single-atom/2D-substrate design strategy.