Towards cost-effective total pollution control in Chinese industries.

The cost-effectiveness of the command-and-control policy instrument in environmental regulations has been debated for a long time. The aims of this study were to quantify the magnitude of the decline in the cost-effectiveness of the Regional Total Pollution Control (RTPC) policy, which includes mandatory emission reduction goals for each province, and to determine factors affecting it. For this purpose, province-level and technology-specific marginal abatement cost curves were constructed for China's three key industries, that is, thermal power, iron and steel, and cement industries. The results show that the average decline in the cost-effectiveness in these industries based on the implementation of the RTPC policy during the 13th Five Year Plan is ∼2.55%. The magnitude of the decline slightly changes from 1.44% to 3.63% (90th percentile) when different emission reduction allocation strategies are selected for different provinces. The three main factors contributing to the decline in the cost-effectiveness are the strictness of the emission reduction goal, variance of unit abatement cost (UAC) of technology, and matching degree between the UAC and emission reduction goals based on the RTPC. The RTPC causes a relatively slight decline in the cost-effectiveness compared with the competitive market and therefore can be used for future policy design.

Wind disasters adaptation in cities in a changing climate: A systematic review.

Wind-related disasters will bring more devastating consequences to cities in the future with a changing climate, but relevant studies have so far provided insufficient information to guide adaptation actions. This study aims to provide an in-depth elaboration of the contents discussed in open access literature regarding wind disaster adaptation in cities. We used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to refine topics and main contents based on 232 publications (1900 to 2019) extracted from Web of Science and Scopus. We conducted a full-text analysis to filter out focal cities along with their adaptation measures. The results show that wind disaster adaptation research in cities has formed a systematic framework in four aspects: 1) vulnerability and resilience of cities, 2) damage evaluation, 3) response and recovery, and 4) health impacts of wind disaster. Climate change is the background for many articles discussing vulnerability and adaptation in coastal areas. It is also embedded in damage evaluation since it has the potential to exacerbate disaster consequences. The literature is strongly inclined towards more developed cities such as New York City and New Orleans, among which New York City associated with Hurricane Sandy ranks first (38/232). Studies on New York City cover all the aspects, including the health impacts of wind disasters which are significantly less studied now. Distinct differences do exist in the number of measures regarding the adaptation categories and their subcategories. We also find that hard adaptation measures (i.e., structural and physical measures) are far more popular than soft adaptation measures (i.e., social and institutional measures). Our findings suggest that policymakers should pay more attention to cities that have experienced major wind disasters other than New York. They should embrace the up-to-date climate change study to defend short-term disasters and take precautions against long-term changes. They should also develop hard-soft hybrid adaptation measures, with special attention on the soft side, and enhance the health impact study of wind-related disasters.