Like China, Japan is a country with frequent flood occurrence, but has achieved great progress in flood disaster management through more than 100-year exploration and practice. This paper reviews the literatures on the flood disaster risk in Japan and finds that Japan pays many attentions to non-structural measures such as public flood risk awareness, real-time early warning system and disaster insurance against flood disaster as well as structural measures like levees and urban sewage system. It has become an academic mainstream in Japan that applying information technology in flood management, integrating urban flood risk management and urban development, and implementing integrated flood risk management. Japanese experience may provide many good implications for Chinese flood disaster management. That is, strengthening the interdisciplinary studies on the flood risk mechanism and management by increasing the research investment; emphasizing public participation and insurance system in flood management; and fastening the development and application of high technology such as information technology in flood risk management.
Glacial lakes are resulted from glacial activities and the increasing water convergence in the front or on the side of glaciers caused by the retreat of glaciers. Global warming results in the frequency increasing and the effect aggravating of the glacial disasters caused by the glacial lakes outburst flood and the glacial mudslide. In this paper, the authors discussed surrounding glacial break conditions, stability evaluation, outburst flood model and other relevent aspects, made a systematic summary of the current situation and progress in the studies on glacial lakes, especially in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and predicted the trend of glacial lakes researches in the future.
The upper Yangtze River is the main sediment source of the Yangtze River basin and its sediment yield is closely related with its ecological environment. In recent decades, as human activities intensified strongly, sediment yield in the upper Yangtze River underwent profound changes. Using annual runoff-sediment records in the period of 1956-2007, this paper made a quantitative analysis of characteristics and causes of changes in sediment discharge of main stream and tributaries of the upper Yangtze River in different periods based on double mass curves and empirical models. Our findings are: 1. The relationship between runoff and sediment load of the main stream and tributaries of the upper Yangtze River had obvious phase characteristics, which reflected the impacts of different kinds and intensities of human activities on fluvial sediment yield and transport. The sediment discharge of the upper Yangtze River in 1994-2002 reduced 143 million tons per year and the contribution from human activities accounted for 91.2%. The main decrease was from the Jialing River. The sediment load in 2003-2007 was lowered by 450 million tons per year, of which 14.1% was induced by the reduction of runoff, 39.8% by sustaining human activities appearing in the earlier period, and 46.2% by sediment trapping in the Three Gorges Reservoir and by the decrease of sediment load in the Jinsha River. 2. The sediment discharge of the Jinsha River in the period of 1983-2000 increased by 48 million tons per year, of which 74.7% was associated with human activities, mainly construction of projects. In the period of 2001-2007, the annual sediment load of the Jinsha River was reduced by 118.3 million tons per year, all due to human activities, including various types of reservoirs among which Ertan Reservoir was the biggest one, soil and water conservation practices and decrease of sediment yield from construction projects. 3. The sediment load of the Jaling River decreased by 82.7 million tons per year in 1985-1993, of which 81.4% was related to human activities, such as the changes in rural socio-economic factors and construction of reservoirs. The reduction of sediment load reached 128.5 million tons per year in the period of 1994-2007, of which the decrease of natural runoff accounted for 29.6%, the sustaining human activities appearing in the earlier period for 42.1%, the newly-built reservoirs, such as Baozhusi reservoir, and soil and water conservation project for 23.4%, and human-induced runoff reduction for 4.9%.
The purpose of disaster risk assessment is to assess “how safe is safe enough?” Acceptable risk is the common method to answer the question which is defined as the level of potential losses that people considers acceptable given existing social, economic, political and environmental conditions. Many countries and regions had a number of explorations on life acceptable risk, but only a few of them were about disaster acceptable risk, and they focused on three types of disaster of landslide, earthquake and flood. According to the risk or its consequence, many countries established quantitative criteria of acceptable risk and most of them were similar. At present the methodology of acceptable risk included risk matrix, cost-benefit analysis, life quality index and FN curves. Risk matrix was based on qualitative analysis and commonly used in the countries lack of data and technology. The three others were based on quantitative analysis, of which cost-benefit analysis was the most commonly used as early as 1969. Life quality index sovled the economical value of life by the combination of GDP, life expectancy and the ratio of work and leisure. And the advantage of FN curves was its expression of graph, howerver its disadvantage was how to calculate the frequency. Now the challenges are uncertainty evaluation, probability assignment, rational value of life, distinction between objective and subjective value and environmental damage. On the basis of a summary of acceptable risk researches home and abroad, this paper prospects that the basic problem of disaster acceptable risk are theory, criteria and methodology of acceptable risk. By three different expressions of life risk, economical risk and environmental risk, this paper proposes that it is necessary to establish the principles and criteria of acceptable risk conformed to our national conditions, and promotes the integrated study on acceptable risk, so as to provide scientific bases for disaster control and risk management.
Human health is one of the key issues either in geographical or environmental science studies in last years. The interested topics can be cataloged as follows: (1) Health issues from global environment change (GEC), including health threats of atmospheric composition change and land use/land cover changes, infectious diseases, food-producing system and health, and health impacts from urbanization. (2) Environmental health risk assessment, including health risks from environmental pollutants (either heavy metals or POPs in air, soil or water), ecological degeneration and natural/human induced hazards. (3) Social determinants of human health, especially health equity. (4) Aging issues, including the health/care demands of old population and their impacts on health/care system. (5) Medical geographical information system, including disease monitoring, modeling and health management. With the fast development of medical geography in China, Chinese scientists have not only engaged in international programme/project planning, but also taken some top position in international organization. The progress of medical geography research in China can be summarized as the following aspects: (1) Geography of endemic diseases is still the study emphasis; (2) The theory of environmental health risk assessment has been generally accepted and the health risk assessing technique of environmental pollution is gradually standardized; (3) The health impacts of global environmental changes on China’s population have begun to attract more attention; (4) With rapid urbanization, environmental health problems in urban and rural areas receive universal recognition; (5) RS, GIS and models are adopted in the study of medical geography. Additionally, ageing and longevity issues, as well as the human dimensions on health, and public health risks assessment of disasters, will be the new research focus of medical geography in China.
Medical geography has a long research history, nonetheless schistosomiasis-medical geography is relatively laggard in the field of Geography, where a lot of study was made by non-geographical professionals. This paper first studied the basic connotation and the principal contents of Schistosomiasis-medical Geography according to the mechanism of schistosomiasis transmission. Monitoring and prediction of snail habitats and schistosomiasis epidemicity were regarded as the principal study contents of Schistosomiasis-medical Geography. Second, connection of geographical factor pairs of meteorology and climatology, soil and vegetation, geomorphology and altitude, hydrology and hydraulics, human and economic factor with the shistosome and its hosts were systematically summarized, which was deemed as the foundation of Schistosomiasis-medical Geography. Third, the key research means for determination and prediction of snail habitats and schistosomiasis epidemicity by remote sensing, GIS and statistics (including geo-statistics) were reviewed worldwide, 7 kinds of prediction methods for snail habitats and 5 kinds of prediction methods for schistosomiasis epidemicity were concluded. 7 kinds of prediction methods for snail habitats were interpretation and cartography of snail habitats, meteorologically based method, images-retrieved information based method, unsupervised classification based method, dynamic monitoring of snail habitats in periods of floods, relation between geographic factors and snail habitats based method, and knowledge driven fuzzy-classification method. 5 kinds of prediction methods for schistosomiasis epidemicity were cartography and spatial auto-relation analysis, schistosomiasis transmission index modeling at large scale, quantitative modeling of various life phases of shistosoma and their hosts, regressive relational analysis and Bayesian modeling between epidemicity and geographic factors, and relation study between epidemicity, snail habitats and contact index of infected waters. Finally this paper analyzed the main challenges and endeavor directions for Schistosomiasis-medical Geography in the future.
From a theoretical perspective, the author argues that evaluation of the environments of human settlement has become an essential tool for urban planning and urban policy studies. In practice, it has three folds of functions: First, it provides a spatial expression tool for describing the current situation of the environments with comparison to that of other places and cities; Second, it helps communicate and get consensus among people and stakeholders in terms of how to improve the environments of human settlement; Third, it is an effective tool for policy analysis and for decision making. The objectives, contents, and principles of the evaluation out of each of the three functions are elaborated. Within this framework, the progress and trends of relevant research were discussed reviewing the English and Chinese literature. It is argued that domestic research on the evaluation of urban and rural environments is inadequate in that most of the current work have focused on the spatial expression of the environments, whereas only a few have put emphasis on the roles for communication and consensus, and policy analysis and decision making. Due to this shortage, the application of the research outcome in urban planning and urban policies is limited. To enhance the policy significance of the studies on the evaluation of human settlement environments, it is necessary to shift the focus point of the study. In particular, the valuation of environments and analysis of policy effects should be strengthened.
The South to North Water Transfer Project, one of the four largest trans-century projects in China, may produce a series of influence on eco-environment in the middle and lower reaches of the Hanjiang River. So it will be of great significance to carry out an overall evaluation of this project. Based on the principle of building evaluation index system discussed in advance, an overall evaluation index system was built to assess the effects of the south to north water transfer project on eco-environment in the middle and lower reaches of the Hanjiang River Basin. After building an index core quantification model, the score of each index was calculated and the weight of each indicator was decided by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. Then weighted summation of each index was used to make the overall evaluation of the project on eco-environment. The result showed that the construction of the project would produce -37.91% ~ -64.46% of effects on the change of eco-environment over the middle-lower Hanjiang River basin, which should have a strong or significant negative impact. And among the six eco-environment variables, the order from strong to weak in the extent was water equality, soil-geological variables, society production, aquicolous biology, water resource and climate respectively. In these variables, the upper effect magnitude of the project on water equality, social production, soil-geological and aquicolous biology variables exceed -40% and on water resource variable also exceed -20%. In terms of the five levels of eco-environmental impacts, including no, minor, significant, strong and extreme impacts, water equality was in the state of extreme or strong negative impact, soil-geological variable belonged to a strong, significant or extreme negative impact and social production belonged to a strong or significant negative impact state, aquicolous biology variables received a strong negative impact, water resource was in the state of significant negative impact, but climate in the minor negative impact state and the magnitude was close to zero.
Complex erosion of wind and water is an effective link between the wind and water process. The coupled wind-water erosion is a process that simultaneously or alternatively reinforces or weakens individual wind or water erosion. The complex erosion by wind and water is different from individual water erosion or wind erosion, which has always induced more serious damage than individual wind or water erosion process. The distribution characteristics, influencing factors, erosion mechanism and ecological restoration were reviewed in detail in this paper.
Semiarid regions and coastal area are among the most important regions for complex erosion of wind and water. The adjacent regions by the provinces of Shanxi, Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia is the most serious erosion zone of complex erosion of wind and water in semiarid regions, belonging to the ecotone between agriculture and animal husbandry. The length of eroded coastal line amounts to one-third of the entire coastal line of China. Coastal erosion region is characterized by popularity, diversity and aggravation.
Erosion characteristics are different because of complex natural and human factors in different zones. Systematic analysis was done from the progresses and shortcomings in the study on complex erosion of wind and water from the aspects of erosion characteristics, soil properties, sediment yield, erosion energy in semiarid regions and erosion characteristics, storm surge in coastal area. A summary was made on the effects of biological and engineering measures on eco-restoration.
The research trends of complex erosion of wind and water were prospected and summed up, and the future studies will focus on the following three aspects: the mechanism of erosion, evaluation of erosion and mechanism of ecological restoration.
Coastal zone is a very special area in the world, which has very high density of population and human activities, and it is highly sensitive to environmental variations including climate change and human impacts. In China, mainly during the past decades, the pollution of land-based sources became more and more serious in the coastal waters mainly due to the rapid progress of industrialization and urbanization in China's East Coastal Regions, which has greatly endangered the local environment and ecosystem security and has greatly blocked the social-economic sustainable development. Non-point source (NPS) pollution plays a very important role in the pollution of land-based sources in coastal zone, and moreover, in many coastal estuaries and gulfs, it has become a dominant factor that resulting in water pollution. Therefore, it is significant to strengthen the studies with emphasis on pollution of land-based sources in coastal zone. In this paper, status and breakthroughs of NPS pollution studies at home and abroad have been reviewed at the first, and the academic gaps between China and the world in this study area has been analyzed. And then, status of the land-based NPS studies in coastal zone has been reviewed in detail, and the insufficiencies of this study area have been summarized. Finally, major questions and key subjects that need furthermore studies in the future have been put forward which are as follows, 1) studies on component and amount of land-based NPS pollutants based on monitoring, 2) key interface and main process of NPS pollutants migration in coastal zone, 3) models suitable for land-based NPS simulation in coastal zone, 4) impacts of land-based NPS on coastal ecosystems and human health, 5) dynamic evaluation of the environmental capacity in coastal zone, 6) environmental impacts of land use and land cover change on coastal waters, 7) methods of TMDL calculation and BMPs that suitable for coastal zone in China.
On the basis of the fractal theory and the selection of different methods of non-criterion degree, this paper analyzes the fractal characters of the loess deposits in the Peninsula of East Liaoning. Used the scale of particle size as the non-criterion degree, the fractal dimension value of Malan Loess is between 2.2085 and 2.3184, with an average of 2.2744, and the correlation coefficient of 0.8835. The value of Lishi Loess is between 2.2748 and 2.4237, with an average of 2.3467, and the correlation coefficient of 0.8920. The whole profile fractal dimension value is between 2.2085 and 2.4237, an average of 2.3187, and the correlation coefficient of more than 0.88. However, taking the scale of percentage of cumulating weight as the non-criterion degree, the fractal dimension value of Malan Loess is between 2.422-2.5042, with an average of 2.4761, and the correlation coefficient of 0.9889. The value of Lishi Loess is between 2.4268-2.545, with an average of 2.4993, and the correlation coefficient of 0.983. The whole profile fractal dimension value is between 2.422-2.545, with the correlation coefficient of more than 0.98. Compared with other regions, the grain-size distribution has good fractal characteristics. Fractal dimension of size in the environment for the formation of the Loess can be used as a good index. Selection of non-criterion degree should be taken into account during the research of the deposits with the same/different origins. The fractal dimension of Malan Loess is lower than Lishi Loess, which indicates that Malan Loess deposited at the stage of strengthening of the East Asian winter monsoon with a cold and dry climate, and also with a small sorting coefficient. The sorting of the Malan Loess is slightly better than that of the Lishi Loess, suggesting that there are the low level of self-organization and the low-dimensional value. The Lishi Loess was deposited when the summer monsoon became stronger with a warm and humid climate. Poor separation and slightly larger sorting coefficient show that there is the higher degree of self-organization and fractal dimension.
Regional gap is an important problem that the regional development of China is facing. The distribution of economy and population, as an embodiment of the spatial equilibrium process of regional development, has a close relation with the state of regional gap. Using gravity models, it works out the center of economic gravity and population gravity (abbr. CEG and CPG), illustrates the coupling process by measuring the overlapping of two centers of gravity and the consistency of their movement, and proves that the coupling process has a high correlation with the evolution of regional gap. Then, a model of the coupling mechanism of CEG and CPG is built. Based on the model, it illustrates the spatial equilibrium process of regional development by the transition of equilibrium location and the conversion of regional potential energy difference, and reveals how the internal and external factors affect the process. Therefore, the authors advance a “multistage inverted-U-curve evolution law” of regional gap. Finally, it analyses the mechanism of the periodic variation of regional gap in China since 1952, and brings up a discussion of the path to coordinating the regional development of China.
The study of regional population evolution is helpful to reveal the rule of population distribution and is important for reasonably making population development policy, and for the promotion of regional sustainable development. By using population structure indexes, spatial auto-correlation analysis and GIS technology, the spatio-temporal dynamics of population distribution in the middle and southern Liaoning urban agglomeration have been analyzed since the 1990s. The results show that: (1) the population quantity of different cities in the middle and southern Liaoning urban agglomeration is quite different, with the density being higher in the west, and the distribution concentrated along traffic axes, and the population distribution of different cities presents distinct positive correlation in 2007. (2) Since the 1990s, there are many differences among the population amplitudes in different cities. The population distribution is of concentration pattern, and the population centralization is enhanced. From 1993 to 2007, the center of gravity moves from northeast to southwest. This paper shows that statistic analysis of spatial auto-correlation should be a good method to explore the hotspots and inner mechanism of distribution, centralization and change of population．
Ecological economic zone that breaks through the bottleneck of economic growth within the ecological limits found in traditional economic zone is the main content and developing direction of regional economy. The current construction of efficient ecological economic zone in Huanghe Delta and Poyang Lake has attracted much attention from the central and local governments. Qiong-Lei ecological economic zone is a strategic concept that was proposed based on the analysis of tropic resources, ecological vulnerability and their spatial connection in Zhanjiang city (Leizhou Peninsula) and Hainan Province. Qiong-Lei area, belonging to the tropics, is rich in tropic crops, sea resources and harbours. Its industries are mainly composed of primary and tertiary industries. They have regional consistency and tight economic connection. However, due to some existing many factors influencing regional ecological safety, the ecology in this area is vulnerable. Thus, it is necessary and urgent to construct Qiong-Lei ecological economic zone and to develop ecology-dominated economy. This paper briefly analyzed the main items of function and economy in Qiong-Lei ecological economic zone, aiming at making a start for the development of tropic ecological economic zone and for the ecological economic integration in typical areas.
Using the mathematics method, this article calculated the urban transportation congestion probability, and analyzed negative externality of traffic congestion caused by the increasing vehicle, and further discussed the implications resulted from this study for solving urban transportation problems in China. The results show that: if urban vehicles and roads synchronously increase, on each road the traffic jam average probability exhibits the trend of the accelerating growth, which can be pictured by the parabola; and along with the size of urban vehicles increase, the traffic jam linearly increases caused by the increase of margin vehicles. In the reality, the rate of urban road increase is lower than that of urban vehicles, and much lower than that of the traffic jam probability. In China, city size is huge, so the traffic congestion externality is obvious. In the municipal areas, the share of transportation land of the whole urban land is very low (around 10%), and the share of urban effective transportation land are smaller. These are important factors affecting urban transportation congestion. In view of the above findings, this article provides some measures for reducing urban transportation jam probability, among which to develop some satellite towns or to establish multi-central land use pattern are essential.
Based on the remote sensing, geographic information systems technology and the basic principles of landscape ecology, we analyzed the dynamics of suburban agricultural landscape changes in Kaifeng city during the urbanization process from 1975 to 2004. The results showed that: in 1975, the agricultural landscape features were characterized by a typical suburban agricultural landscape pattern, and landscape types were mainly dry land and paddy fields landscape types, followed by the construction land landscape types. Landscape was composed of a mosaic of agriculture, urban and natural vegetations. In 2004, urbanization in the western suburbs was obvious, with dense buildings and roads, and the main types were irrigated land and construction land landscapes. The northern suburbs basically remained the countryside agricultural landscape. However, from 1975 to 2004, in the two sampling areas, landscape dynamics were both significant. The areas of dry land, paddy fields, scrub and sandy landscape type decreased, and reed landscape types disappeared, while the area of roads, ponds, rivers, green land, construction land, irrigated land landscapes increased. Landscape changes have a close relation with urbanization and diverting water from the Yellow River.
South Jiangsu is one of the most rapidly developing areas in the eastern coastal region of China in recent three decade years. South-Jiangsu model, characterized by township and village enterprises, is a successful type of rural territorial development in China. It proves a huge success of China's reform and opening policy. It has an important theoretical and practical significance for understanding rural territorial development and finding approaches to new countryside construction to analyze thoroughly the rural development process and its driving forces mechanism in south-Jiangsu model. In this paper, the rural development process and driving forces mechanism of Suzhou region, a typical representative of south-Jiangsu model, were studied. An exponential growth trend of Suzhou’s GDP was seen during 1978-2006 with an average annual growth rate of 14.4%. The proportion of agriculture production value declined from 28.1% to 1.9%, and that of the tertiary industry increased from 16.2% to 32.7%. The proportion of agricultural labor in rural area declined from 75.5% to 16.8%. The urban and rural income gap of Suzhou city is widening but far smaller than that of the whole country. The ratio of urban to rural income of Suzhou city increased from 1.27 in 1978 to 2.0 in 2006. Rural non-agricultural industries and population growth greatly promoted rural urbanizing process of Suzhou city. Urban construction land in Suzhou city had increased 4.7 times during 1989-2006. Industrialization, urbanization, upgrading of industrial structure and institutional innovation are the four main driving forces in the rural development process of Suzhou city, and finally, their driving mechanism to rural development were analyzed in the paper.
