ABSTRACT
To achieve the "Double Carbon" target, China is paying increasing attention to green building development. Thus, this study selected 26 regional green building development planning documents that have been put into practice since the implementation of the 14th Five-Year Plan and analyzed different development goals and common development barriers and paths presented in regional documents by conducting qualitative research. After the analysis of common goals and goals with regional characteristics, this study verified that spatial imbalances did exist in the development targets of green building in each region during the "14th Five-Year Plan", and the development priorities also varied from region to region. Due to the relation between development goals and the current situation, this study can also illustrate the spatial imbalances of the development situation between different regions. The results of this study can assist regional governments in gaining a clear self-positioning to judge whether they keep pace with the national development level of green buildings and encourage them to take measures to guarantee the stable development of green buildings.
Subject(s)
Sustainable Development , Sustainable Growth , ChinaABSTRACT
Assessing landform vulnerability to soil erosion is crucial for improved sustainable land use planning and management. In the Loess Plateau of the Northern Shaanxi Province of China, soil erosion has been reported as a major threat to sustainable land management and impacts on driving the socio-economic benefits that can be accrued from the landforms. Several studies especially on Erosion Potential Mapping (EPM) in the region have been conducted but the role of the fractal dimension (FD) of the terrain features has been limited. In this study, the paper assessed the role of fractal terrain features on the overall EPM. The Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) was adopted using 6 criteria, FD of the terrain, Land Use Land Cover, Slope, Elevation, Geomorphology and Flow Accumulation. These were developed in a Geographic Information System (GIS) framework. Eight Scales (8) were evaluated in order to select the best Scale with the lowest Consistency Ratio (CR) and the Minimum Relative Error (MRE). The results from this study shows that fractal features of terrain when integrated with the rest of the criteria produced a reliable EPM for the study area. The absence of the FD also gives unrealistic results for the EPM. The EPM with FD distribution recorded 29.4% for low erosion potential whereas EPM without FD recorded 46.7%. A larger portion of the Shaanxi province (70%) is found to be at a higher risk of erosion. Therefore, it is hoped that the findings from this research would further boost the integration of fractals into EPM in China and similar regions across the World. The study further recommends that sustainable soil management measures are put in place to reduce the erosion risk in the province to protect the natural ecological habitat.
ABSTRACT
The effective reproduction number (R) which signifies the number of secondary cases infected by one infectious individual, is an important measure of the spread of an infectious disease. Due to the dynamics of COVID-19 where many infected people are not showing symptoms or showing mild symptoms, and where different countries are employing different testing strategies, it is quite difficult to calculate the R, while the pandemic is still widespread. This paper presents a probabilistic methodology to evaluate the effective reproduction number by considering only the daily death statistics of a given country. The methodology utilizes a linearly constrained Quadratic Programming scheme to estimate the daily new infection cases from the daily death statistics, based on the probability distribution of delays associated with symptom onset and to reporting a death. The proposed methodology is validated in-silico by simulating an infectious disease through a Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model. The results suggest that with a reasonable estimate of distribution of delay to death from the onset of symptoms, the model can provide accurate estimates of R. The proposed method is then used to estimate the R values for two countries.
