Does environmental regulation improve residents' health? Evidence from China.

Environmental pollution is an important factor that harms public health, and environmental regulation is the policy instrument to govern pollution, so what impact does environmental regulation have on the public health? What are the mechanisms? To answer these questions, this paper constructs ologit model and uses China General Social Survey data for empirical analysis. The study found first that environmental regulation has a significant effect on improving the health level of residents, and this effect has been increasing with the passage of time. Second, the impact of environmental regulation on residents' health is different among residents with different characteristics. Specifically, the positive impact of environmental regulation on residents' health is stronger among residents with at least a university degree, residents with urban-registered residences, and residents living in economically developed areas. Third, the mechanism analysis found that environmental regulation can improve residents' health by reducing pollutant emissions and improving environmental quality. Finally, by introducing a cost benefit model, it was found that environmental regulation has a significant effect on improving the welfare level of individual residents and society as a whole. Hence, Environmental regulation is an effective means to improve residents' health, but when implementing environmental regulation, we should also pay attention to its negative impact on residents' employment and income.

Integrating Landscape Ecological Risks and Ecosystem Service Values into the Ecological Security Pattern Identification of Wuhan Urban Agglomeration.

Urban agglomerations are the main form of China's future promotion of new urbanization development. Nevertheless, their accelerated expansion and development are increasingly threatening the security of regional ecosystems. The identification and optimization of ecological safety patterns (ESPs) is the fundamental spatial way to guarantee the ecological safety of urban circles and realize the sustainable development of the socio-economic and ecological environment. Nevertheless, from the perspective of urban green, low-carbon, and ecological restoration, regional safety evaluation still lacks a complete framework integrating ecological elements and social and natural indicators. Moreover, the evaluation method of ESPs also has a lack of judgment on the long-term change dynamics of regional landscape ecological risks and ecosystem service values. Thus, we proposed a new regional ecological security evaluation system based on ecosystem service value (ESV) and landscape ecological risk (LER), using the Wuhan urban agglomeration (WUA) as the research object. This study analyzed LER and ESV's spatial and temporal changes over nearly 40 years from 1980 to 2020. LER and LSV were used as ecological elements combined with natural and human-social elements to jointly model the resistance surface of the landscape pattern. Applying the minimum cumulative resistance model (MCR), we identified green ecological corridors, constructed the ESPs of WUA, and proposed optimization measures. Our results show that: (1) The proportion of higher- and high-ecological-risk areas in WUA has decreased from 19.30% to 13.51% over the past 40 years. Over time, a "low-high-low" hierarchical distribution characteristic centered on Wuhan city was gradually formed in the east, south, and north; the total value of ecosystem services increased from CNY1110.998 billion to CNY1160.698 billion. The ESV was higher in the northeastern, southern, and central parts of the area. (2) This study selected 30 ecological source areas with a total area of about 14,374 km2 and constructed and identified 24 ecological corridors and 42 ecological nodes, forming a multi-level ecological network optimization pattern with intertwined points, lines, and surfaces, increasing the connectivity of the ecological network and improving the ecological security level of the study area to a large extent, which is of great significance to promote the ecological priority and green-rise strategy of WUA and the high-quality development path of the green ecological shelter.