This article is based on the practice of comprehensive assessment of large-scale natural disasters in China in recent years. It elaborates on the comprehensive assessment of affected area, damage extent, and direct economic losses in large-scale natural disasters. The result of rapid assessment of large-scale natural disaster is the basis of emergency rescue and relocation of disaster-affected population; the result of comprehensive assessment of large-scale natural disaster is the basis for disaster recovery and reconstruction planning. By integrating comprehensive field investigation, remote sensing monitoring, modeling, and local level reporting of disaster impact data, accuracy and precision of the result of assessment of large-scale natural disasters can be improved. In order to develop a scientific and effective large-scale natural disaster assessment indicator system, further improvements in practice of integrated assessment are needed.
A magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck Ludian County, Zhaotong City, Yunnan Province at 16:30 on 3 August 2014, which caused severe damages on residential life and assets. In order to conduct a rapid earthquake impact assessment, we collected data on seismic intensity, topography, land use/land cover, population, residential area distribution, and buildings of the earthquake area and high-resolution remote sensing images. Spatial analysis in GIS and a quantitative evaluation model were employed for the assessment, which focused on the following aspects of the disaster area including natural environmental conditions of the severe impact area, impact on the affected population, buildings, roads and traffic, and other sensitive exposure units, and risk of secondary geological hazards along the Niulan River; and restoring from slope cropland to forest and preventing soil erosion. Based on the assessment results, this article provides the some suggestions for the earthquake relief effort, geological hazard prevention, and post-disaster reconstruction and ecological recovery of the Ludian seismic area.
Development disparities among regions are the joint effect of multiple factors in the natural, economic, social, and cultural systems. Developing index systems for the measurement of regional development disparities reflects a trend of movement from single factor and single index analysis to multiple factors and multiple indices analysis in the field of regional development disparity research. Well-built index systems can be useful in promoting information rich and artificial intelligence based regional disparity analysis, identifying and analyzing factors that constitute constraints on regional development, and seeking directions for policy making to narrow gaps of regional development. (1) Regional development disparity refers to the extent to which regions as a whole or in certain aspects differ from each other in economic and social development or quality of human habitation. It is region specific, object oriented, development focused, integrated, and differentiation concerned. The key components of regional development disparities include economic, social, human capability, and human habitation disparities. (2) Principles to be observed in designing an useful index system for measuring regional development disparities include that the index system being developed should be scientifically proven, holistic, operable, hierarchical, and able to incorporate dynamic changes. Generally speaking, the complete index system should comprise of two sets of indices for different scales of analysis at the macroscopic scale and the microscopic scale. The hierarchical structure of these indices should include composite indices at the top, indicators in the middle, and attributes at the bottom. (3) In total, three sets of indices for measuring regional development disparities are developed initially. The indices for macroscopic analysis are comprised of 3 composite indices, 18 indicators, and 54 attributes. The recommended indices for macroscopic analysis include 3 composite indices, 11 indicators, and 13 attributes. The indices for microscopic analysis are made of 3 composite indices, 14 indicators, and 70 attributes.
The twenty-first century is an era that humanity challenges the ocean, competition for marine resources among countries in the world becomes increasingly more intense. The ocean becomes a global forefront of a new round of competition, and the development of emerging strategic marine industries becomes national competitions in seizing the strategic high ground. Since the beginning of the century, with the development of marine technology, emerging strategic marine industries gradually became a new growth point of the global economy. Based on the factors affecting industrial development and taking into consideration existing research results and the characteristics of the emerging strategic marine industries, this study selected 22 indicators from six areas, including basic support, economic support, technology support, human resources support, government support, and environmental support to build an evaluation index system of supporting conditions for emerging strategic marine industries. Using this supporting condition evaluation index system, a combination of factor weight derivation methods, set pair analysis, and fuzzy c-means clustering analysis, this study analyzes and compares the supporting conditions of emerging strategic marine industries in 11 coastal provinces in mainland China. The results show that: (1) Overall, there are clear differences among these provinces in supporting conditions. The coastal provinces can be divided into four groups with varied supporting conditions. The first group includes Guangdong, Shandong, and Shanghai Provinces, where comprehensive support is excellent. These provinces are the "three pillars" of emerging strategic marine industry development in China, with a balanced support of each of the six conditions. The second group includes Jiangsu and Liaoning Provinces, where the comprehensive support is relatively good. The third group contains Tianjin, Fujian, and Zhejiang Provinces. In this group, comprehensive support is average, and there is a general lack of single strong supporting condition that contributes to the comprehensive support. The fourth group includes Hebei, Hainan, and Guangxi Provinces. In these provinces, comprehensive support is weak and positive single supporting condition is missing. (2) Comparative advantages and disadvantages of various provinces are analyzed, which provides important support for development planning of emerging strategic marine industries in the coastal provinces and municipalities. In this study, only the current status of China's emerging strategic marine industry supporting conditions have been evaluated. This article proposes that a dynamic trend analysis should be considered in future research.
Issues of regional economic development disparity have been particularly important in China, which inherited an spatially unbalanced economy from its imperial history and as a vestige of a past troubled by colonialism, civil wars, and pestilences. Zhejiang Province is an important eastern Chinese province. It has long been noted for the production of green tea, silk, and aquaculture. Since the launch of the economic reforms in 1978, Zhejiang has been experiencing a dramatic process of triple transition (decentralization, globalization, and market reforms). It has followed an entrepreneurial economic development model that has made it a prosperous center of small industries geared to export of consumer goods, in particular toys and textiles. Zhejiang's transition towards a market-oriented economy has been spectacular. However, Zhejiang Province also faces serious challenges from regional development disparity due to the differences of infrastructure development, proximity to markets and coastal areas, natural resource endowments, demographic factors, and regional policies. Spatially evident unevenness and instability in regional wealth distribution has been one of the most salient features of regional development in Zhejiang.
Since the 1990s, spatial disparity of economic development in Zhejiang and China has further intensified. Geographers are involved in the development-related discussions and are intrigued by questions such as identifying regions or places that are rich or poor and determining causal factors. Questions such as: Is geographic disparity widening and why? What can be done to reduce poverty and spatial disparity? Will wealth be shared by people in all regions and places? Since regional disparity may threaten national unity and social stability, it has become a burning issue in China, attracting considerable attention from policy makers and scholars. Following the multi-scale and multi-mechanism framework, this article analyzes the spatial-temporal dynamics of regional disparities in Zhejiang across spatial scales. The results show that: (1) regional disparity is sensitive to the geographical scales. It is more pronounced at finer spatial scales. (2) Economic situation presents a rich-poor gradient from the northeast to the southwest. The rich and poor counties have a strong tendency to remain as such and their surrounding areas tend to become more similar with them in wealth status. In addition, the less developed counties are more likely to fall into a "poverty trap." (3) Regional economic development of Zhejiang Province displays strong spatial dependence and self-reinforcing clustering. Using a multi-level model, the study further shows that regional disparity in the province is sensitive to both core-periphery structure and time. Globalization is the dominant driving force of regional disparity, and decentralization is the important mechanism for forming the core-periphery structure. Developing a market economy has the potential to mediate the uneven development driven by the spatial concentration of foreign investment. This article empirically analyzes the core-periphery model of the new economic geography from an evolutionary perspective, verifying the model's applicability in China, challenging the neoclassical growth theory that emphasizes free mobility of capital and celebrates the long-term convergence. The author holds that the geographical and political preferences of global capital will widen the regional economic gaps. In addition, inequality between urban and rural areas is also an important aspect of disparity in the development of Zhejiang Province. Achieving a more balanced territorial distribution of wealth is among the biggest challenges for regional economic development policy design in Zhejiang and China.
The development of emerging industries in a region is one of the focuses of economic geography research. Particularly, research on the development and spatial distribution of renewable energy industries under the background of global climate change and energy crisis is of great importance in China. This paper examines the spatial distribution of wind turbine manufacturing enterprises and influencing factors. Wind power and wind power equipment manufacturing industry in China developed very rapidly and the country became the largest wind power market during the past 10 years, primarilly due to the policy support of the central and local governments. This research built a database of enterprises based on the statistics of China's installed wind power capacity from 2005 to 2012. The paper analyzes the spatial distribution of the wind turbine manufacturing enterprises and subsidiary companies at the prefecture level. The results show that most of the domestic wind turbine manufacturing enterprises were founded by equipment manufacturing enterprises and are located in the same city as their parents firms, while foreign firms are often located in cities with strong equipment manufacturing industrial base. The subsidiary companies of wind turbine manufacturing enterprises are located in the northwest, North China, and northeast as well as the east coastal areas with rich wind resources. The econometric result of zero inflated negative binomial regression model shows that policy, industrial base, and wind resource endowment had different impacts on the location choice of the wind equipment manufacturing enterprises and their subsidiaries. Wind resource endowment and local government support have significant impacts on the location choice of subsidiary companies of wind turbine manufacturing enterprises, while industrial base mainly affects the location choice of the wind equipment manufacturing parent firms. All three factors considered together, industrial base has the most important impact on location choice. The results of this research provides important information for wind equipment manufacturing enterprises to choose new locations and for local governments to develop strategic industrial development policies.
Interaction between aeolian and fluvial systems occurs widely on the surface of the Earth and plays an important role in the development of arid landforms. The most distinctive characteristics of dryland geomorphology by this interaction is that rivers are associated with deserts. Increasingly, more researchers have focused their study on the combination of desert and river landforms in arid zone. But such research are often limited to qualitative description of local areas and there have been fewer detailed examinations at a relatively large scale. Based on the principles of landscape ecology and with the help of GIS techniques as well as using landscape diversity and isolation indices, this article analyzes the characteristics of the spatial patterns of different landscape types of deserts and rivers in 12 deserts (sandy lands) within 10 watersheds in northern China, using the Hotan River as an example for the western regions and the Xiliao River for the eastern regions. The results show that on the whole, at the scale of watershed and sandy land, the landscape structure in the interior regions is much more complicated than that in the exterior regions, while its fragmentation degree is lower. Landscape structure is similar in the exterior regions. In the interior regions, however, landscape indices vary: from the west to the east, landscape diversity decreases, while landscape fragmentation degree increases gradually. At the scale of channel and sand dune, in the buffer zone, the structure of the dune landscape is comparatively more complicated in the Hotan River than the Xiliao River, but the fragmentation degree is lower. Landscape fragmentation is inversely related to the distance from the river course, that is, fragmentation degree decreases with increasing distance from channels, while richness increases with this distance. In terms of dune types, sand dunes in the Xiliao River basin are mainly fixed and semi-fixed, while in the Hotan River Basin, complex mobile dunes dominate. The proportion of the area of the main dune type decreases as their distance from the river increases. The fragmentation degree of different landscape types decreases as their distance from the river increases, but the main type of dune landscape becomes increasingly complicated further from the river course. Aeolian landform is a product of long-term interactions of various agents including water and wind, reflecting landscape heterogeneity at different scales. At the watershed/desert scale, climate, topography, vegetation, and hydrology dominate the formation of landscape patterns, while at the cannel/dune scale, the role of cannel patterns and directions of wind and water are more prominent. In future study, vector index should be introduced to make possible comprehensive analysis of the river corridor effect on desert distribution and to reveal the mechanisms and driving forces of river and desert landscape pattern formation in arid environments.
Coastal wetlands and tidal land in North Jiangsu Province are the most typical mudflat in China, which lies between the estuaries of the Yangtze River and the former Yellow River channel. This article examines the evolution and spatial distribution of wetlands and tidal land in North Jiangsu Province between 1980 and 2008 through image analysis of Landsat TM images from 1980 and 1992 and ALOS images from 2008. The results indicate that: (a) The study region had experienced enormous changes in this time period. The total area of coastal wetlands decreased by 1273.11 km2, that is, at an annual rate of 45.47 km2; the erosion-sedimentation area was 965.14 km2 and the erosion area was about 307.97 km2. (b)This region can be divide into six geographic units from the north to the south, and three zones from the east to the west (overlay unit, changed unit, and mudflat unit); (c) In these natural units, the proportion of transformed wetlands was 38.39%, while the proportion of lost wetlands was 14.97%. Natural wetlands decreased by 354.1 km2, constructed wetlands increased by 1061.45 km2, and non-wetland area increased by 253.09 km2. Changed units were about 20.51% of the total area, in which most wetlands are in natural successions. (d) The study area also had distinct regional succession characteristics and distribution patterns of vegetation communities. Natural wetlands succession occurred mainly in the changed units with a total area of 554.52 km2, which is in agreement with the erosion/sedimentation situations of corresponding section.
Decentralization is the main cause of differences in tourism policy, public infrastructure development, tourism investment and so on, which have aggravated the spatial unevenness of tourism development in China. Since the reform and opening up from the late 1970s, services previously provided by the national government was replaced by those provided by different public sectors in the local governments as well as private and voluntary organizations, increased the spatial diffusion of authority and diversity of network structure and patterns. There has been a large number of empirical studies on the spatial unevenness of tourism development. However, these studies mainly attribute causes of such development to urban development factors, such as tourism resource endowment, location in transportation network and infrastructure. Discussions of these problems did not address root causes of the spatially uneven development. Empirical search for a direct relationship between institution and tourism growth remains inconclusive. The objective of this paper is to examine the spatially uneven development of tourism destinations in China in the market-oriented reform process. Existing research shows that spatially uneven development of tourism destinations was aggravated by decentralization, which leads to differences in tourism policy and investment and the provision of public goods and services, and a profound analytical framework is needed for further empirical studies. This paper reviewed relevant studies on the links between decentralization and development of tourism, spatial influences of decentralization on tourism, and put forward a theoretical framework of resort spatial optimization based on a political economy analysis. We define four types of stakeholders under the decentralization framework-the central and local governments, capital enterprises, non-profit organizations, and local communities-and discuss the spatially uneven development as a result of the power distribution of tourism destinations comprised of the four stakeholder groups identified above. Future research should take the relationships among three stakeholders-the government, investors, and community residents-as a starting point, and reveal existing problems in the following four areas: the decentralization of authority of regional tourism organizations, institutional and technical supports of community participation, restructuring of industrial space, and the political role of rural tourism development, and to realize the sustainable development of tourism destinations. It is worth noting that decentralization in China has been a huge system engineering endeavor. This paper simply analyzes the spatially uneven development of tourism destinations caused by unequal network relationships among the main stakeholders, without dealing with many details that should be taken into consideration in further in-depth study.
