China was the first developing country to achieve the poverty eradication target of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 10 years ahead of schedule. Its past approach has been, mainly, to allocate more fiscal spending to rural areas, while strengthening accountability for poverty alleviation. However, some literature suggests that poor rural areas still lack the endogenous dynamics for sustainable growth. Using a vector autoregression (VAR) model, based on data from 1990 to 2019, we find that fiscal spending plays a much more significant role in reducing the poverty ratio than agricultural development. When poverty alleviation is treated as an administrative task, each poor village must complete the spending of top-down poverty alleviation funds within a time frame that is usually shorter than that required for successful specialty agriculture. As a result, the greater the pressure of poverty eradication and the more funds allocated, the more poverty alleviation projects become an anchor for accountability, and the more local governments’ consideration of industry cycles and input–output analysis give way to formalism, homogeneity, and even complicity. We suggest using the leverage of fiscal funds to direct more resources to productive uses, thus guiding future rural revitalization in a more sustainable direction.

The present survey was designed to investigate the perception of health risks among college students in China. The data are the responses of a sample of 3,069 college students at one university to surveys that include measures of several dimensions of public judgments about fifteen specific hazards. Chinese college students conveyed their concerns as falling into three broad categories: Environmental (e.g., global warming, natural catastrophes, the ozone hole, air pollution, chemical pollution, pesticides in food), Technological (e.g., nuclear power stations, thermal power, genetically modified food, medical X-rays), and Social (cigarette smoking, drinking alcohol, overtime study or work, mental stress, motor vehicle accidents). The data were collected with a self-report questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were used to illustrate the levels of perceived risk according to the percent of “high risk” responses as well as the mean response values. Generally, the hazards that were perceived as posing the greatest health risk were those belonging to the social health risks; items related to technology risks received the lowest percentage of “high health risk” rankings. Traditional environmental risks such as natural catastrophes, pollution issues (chemical pollution, air pollution), and pesticides in food were ranked as being relatively high risks. The respondents were less concerned about new emerging issues and long-term environmental risks (global warming). In this survey, motor vehicle accidents were considered to be a “high health risk” by the greatest percentage of respondents. Generally speaking, the female respondents’ degree of recognition of health risks is higher than that of male respondents. Only for the item of smoking was the male respondents’ degree higher than that of females. There is also a geographic imbalance in the health risk perceptions. The degree of recognition of health risks from respondents in municipalities is generally lower than that of respondents from other areas except for items such as natural disasters, smoking, medical X-rays, and mental stress, which are exceptions.

Urban greenways are pivotal in enriching urban quality and fostering socio-ecological sustainability. Previous studies on urban greenway networks have often overlooked user-based experience efficiency, leading to the underutilization and insufficient translation of cultural services into human well-being. In this study, we introduce a user behavior-driven assessment framework for planning multifunctional urban greenways that connect parks with high green space exposure and maximize recreational mobility. Beijing’s built-up urban areas (BBUA) were selected as the case study area. Firstly, we evaluated the green space exposure of 331 parks in BBUA using an integrated “Availability–Accessibility–Adaptability” assessment framework as potential carriers. Then, through spatially explicit workflows and the least-cost path methodology, we leveraged a vast dataset of 70 million public transportation swipe records to optimize the alignment of multifunctional greenways, prioritizing the criterion of maximizing recreational footfalls. The results showed that the potential greenways network spans 1566.36 km in BBUA, encompassing 93.88% of parks and offering six diverse functions. It can serve 34.39–35.92% of bus recreation passengers, with this ratio tending to be higher on weekends. However, we identified obstacle points (non-greenway sections) in the networks based on residents’ view perceptions and panoramic street images, primarily located in densely built-up central areas and along southern trunk roads. By addressing these disconnections, the integrity and connectivity of urban greenway networks in BBUA will be improved. Overall, the framework we present can be used to construct greenway networks that maximize the perceived accessibility for bus-based visitors, with valuable implications for sustainable urban planning and regeneration initiatives.

Disaster governance draws attention from academics and policymakers, especially in developing countries. This paper shows how daily geo-disaster governance at local level operates in China and then reveals the causes of its pattern. To achieve the goals, we apply the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework as the lens into the case of Chongqing’s Three Gorges Reservoir Region. We find that China’s daily geo-disaster governance, as a whole, is a top–down system where public sectors play an active role. It emphasizes technology, engineering, and profession, and features the matrix of fragmentation. The governance varies as the situations change and leaves disconnection among situations. The exogenous environment, several rules in action situations, and evaluative criteria shape the governance pattern altogether. Finally, we suggest that the government should change from disaster orientation to people orientation, from discontinuity to continuity, and from singularity to diversity.

The application of caring robots is currently a widely accepted solution to the problem of aging. However, for the elderly groups who live in gregarious residences and share intelligence devices, caring robots will cause intimacy and assistance dilemmas in the relationship between humans and non-human agencies. This is an information-assisted machine setting, with resulting design ethics issues brought about by the binary values of human and machine, body and mind. The “vulnerability” in risk ethics demonstrates that the ethical problems of human institutions stem from the increase of dependence and the obstruction of intimacy, which are essentially caused by the increased degree of ethical risk exposure and the restriction of agency. Based on value-sensitive design, caring ethics and machine ethics, this paper proposes a flexible design with the interaction-distance-oriented concept, and reprograms the ethical design of caring robots with intentional distance, representational distance and interpretive distance as indicators. The main purpose is to advocate a new type of human-machine interaction relationship emphasizing diversity and physical interaction.

Social resilience for public health is a new theoretical framework for understanding public health risk governance capacity. This study identifies 18 indicators from the publicly available database and adopts the method of multivariable analysis to evaluate the level of social resilience for public health in 73 countries along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The study finds that the main influencing factors of social resilience for public health are institutional resilience, physical resilience, and participation resilience. The capacity of public health risk governance in countries along the BRI is classified into three levels: high, medium, and low. A high level of public health risk governance capacity is mainly shown in developed European countries such as Italy, rich Southwestern Asian countries such as the United Arab Emirates, and East Asian countries represented by Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. The middle-level countries are mainly distributed at the junction of Eurasia, which Russia represents. The low-level countries are primarily distributed in South Asia, Africa, and the war zones. In general, countries along the BRI have polarized the capacity of public health risk governance and structural inequalities, mainly manifested in large differences in the organizational capacity and mobilization capacity between countries in response to public health risk events, and the gap between the rich and the poor within a country. Under such circumstances, the building of a Community of Common Health is required to be accelerated.