The Carbon Emission Characteristics and Reduction Potential in Developing Areas: Case Study from Anhui Province, China.

Global warming and world-wide climate change caused by increasing carbon emissions have attracted a widespread public attention, while anthropogenic activities account for most of these problems generated in the social economy. In order to comprehensively measure the levels of carbon emissions and carbon sinks in Anhui Province, the study adopted some specific carbon accounting methods to analyze and explore datasets from the following suggested five carbon emission sources of energy consumption, food consumption, cultivated land, ruminants and waste, and three carbon sink sources of forest, grassland and crops to compile the carbon emission inventory in Anhui Province. Based on the compiled carbon emission inventory, carbon emissions and carbon sink capacity were calculated from 2000 to 2019 in Anhui Province, China. Combined with ridge regression and scenario analysis, the STIRPAT model was used to evaluate and predict the regional carbon emission from 2020 to 2040 to explore the provincial low-carbon development pathways, and carbon emissions of various industrial sectors were systematically compared and analyzed. Results showed that carbon emissions increased rapidly from 2000 to 2019 and regional energy consumption was the primary source of carbon emissions in Anhui Province. There were significant differences found in the increasing carbon emissions among various industries. The consumption proportion of coal in the provincial energy consumption continued to decline, while the consumption of oil and electricity proceeded to increase. Furthermore, there were significant differences among different urban and rural energy structures, and the carbon emissions from waste incineration were increasing. Additionally, there is an inverted "U"-shape curve of correlation between carbon emission and economic development in line with the environmental Kuznets curve, whereas it indicated a "positive U"-shaped curve of correlation between carbon emission and urbanization rate. The local government should strengthen environmental governance, actively promote industrial transformation, and increase the proportion of clean energy in the energy production and consumption structures in Anhui Province. These also suggested a great potential of emission reduction with carbon sink in Anhui Province.

Spatial and temporal differentiation and influencing factors of environmental governance performance in the Yangtze River Delta, China.

As the development of Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration has been upgraded to a national level development strategy in China, relevant regions need to pay more attention to the environmental governance issues. Based on the 2013-2018 development data of 41 cities and the established evaluation indicator system with "press-state-response" (PSR) model, we mainly use a combination of global principal component analysis (GPCA) and entropy method to comprehensively measure regional environmental governance performance (EGP) in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration. Next, the spatial relationship is explored and discussed with spatial autocorrelation analysis. Finally, the panel Tobit model is used to perform a regression analysis on the factors affecting the performance of environmental governance in the Yangtze River Delta region. The results are summarized as follows. (1) From 2013 to 2018, the overall environmental governance performance of the Yangtze River Delta region maintained a steady growth trend, of which the environmental governance performance of Jiangsu Province and Shanghai maintained a steady increase, and the environmental governance performance of Anhui and Zhejiang Province fluctuated greatly. (2) These cities with better EGP are mainly located in the central and southern regions of the Yangtze River Delta, and those cities with poor EGP are mainly located in the northern part of the Yangtze River Delta. The environmental governance performance gap between provinces and cities is obviously large, and there are significant spatial positive correlations, spatial spillover effects and a trend of agglomeration with increased volatility. (3) The regression analysis shows that the economic development level has a significant positive impact on the EGP of the Yangtze River Delta region. Meanwhile, the negative impact of industrial structure and foreign investment is significant, but the positive impact of R&D investment intensity is insignificant, on the performance of environmental governance in the Yangtze River Delta region.

Disparity in elevational shifts of upper species limits in response to recent climate warming in the Qinling Mountains, North-central China.

Examinations of upper elevational distribution limits of tree species can provide indications of how subalpine vegetation responds to the ongoing climate warming. Dynamics and functional mechanisms of elevational treelines are reasonably well understood, while explanations for tree species-specific upper elevational distribution limits below the treeline still remain unclear. In this study, we used a state-of-the-art dendroecological approach to reconstruct long-term changes of species-specific upper elevational distribution limits of different plant functional type (i.e., light-demanding deciduous coniferous larch at treeline, shade-tolerant evergreen coniferous fir and shade-intolerant deciduous broad-leaved birch below treeline) along elevational gradients in the Qinling Mountains of north-central China. Over the past three centuries, all the upper species limits shifted upslope as a response to climate warming. However, the warming-induced upslope migrations showed substantial differences, displaying the maximum upward shift of larch with an average elevation of 24.7 m during the past century, while only a slight advance of the non-treeline tree species. The disparity in elevational advance of upper species limits might be attributable to the presence of interspecific competition, showing that the non-treeline tree species experienced intermediate interspecific competition while the treeline tree species experienced no interspecific competition. Thus, our findings suggested that in addition to climate warming, biotic interaction may contribute much to shaping the species-specific upper limit dynamics. This study not only enhanced mechanistic understanding of long-term species-specific upper elevational distribution limit changes, but also highlighted the jointly effects of rising temperatures and species interactions on subalpine vegetation dynamics.